The Women of the Cousins’ War

by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin

  His situation grew even more perilous when Richard Duke of York appointed himself as Captain of Calais, in place of the imprisoned Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset, bringing the drama of the command of Calais to an absolute crisis point. As if this were not bad enough, parliament had once again failed to grant adequate funds to the garrison. Once again Richard Woodville was in command of unpaid soldiers and once again he had to cope with mutiny and rebellion. This time however, he had no superior officer, he had no king to invoke. The soldiers seized the goods and wool sacks of the English merchants and Richard Duke of York could do nothing from London. Richard Woodville had to allow the mutinous soldiers to sell their stolen goods and keep the profits of mutiny and theft. Indeed he may have done more. He may have encouraged, or even ordered, the mutiny in order to keep the garrison in the hands of the Lancastrian party, and to maintain his own independence from York. If he held the garrison in the name of the king he was obeying his duty to the king, and providing a valuable base for any counter-attack on York.

  Viscount Bourchier, a York kinsman, had to resolve the stand-off by bringing the unpaid wages from London, with new orders that Rivers and his fellow-commander Lord Welles should remain in command of Calais, under the suspicious glare of the new Protector of England. The veiled enmity between the garrison and the man who now ruled England came to crisis point when York decided to enter his town of Calais and sailed from England. The garrison, commanded by Jacquetta’s husband, raised the chain across the harbour and prevented York from entering, as if he were an enemy vessel. In effect, they prepared the garrison for siege against its own official commander. It was a tremendous insult, it was open defiance; and it probably signalled the start of a secret campaign in support of the imprisoned Duke of Somerset. Richard Woodville may have been preparing an expedition to free his commander from the Tower of London. Certainly, Richard Duke of York must have feared that the Calais garrison, having resisted his arrival, might mount an invading force against England, release their commander Somerset from the Tower, free the queen and the prince, and make war on him.

  But then, in December 1454, after nearly a year and a half of illness, to the ecstatic joy of the court party – the king recovered.

  With the recovery of their king, the see-saw of politics threw the Lancastrian party as high as they had ever been. Richard Duke of York resigned his office, and his friends and kinsmen lost their posts as the king and queen returned their friends and favourites to power. Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset emerged triumphant from the Tower of London; the king declared him a loyal servant, and presented him with the keys to Calais in March 1455. For Jacquetta and her husband it must have been a great moment. Richard Woodville’s command of his men and the famous Calais garrison’s esprit de corps had held the town against the Yorkists, so that it could be returned in triumph to Edmund Beaufort and the Lancastrian party.

  Richard Woodville probably came home from Calais for a visit to the triumphant court and conceived a new baby, born this year: Edward. The king confirmed Richard Woodville’s captaincy of Calais, for later that year he returned to his post, once more holding the garrison town for his lord Somerset. It must have been a great celebration for them all. Within two or three months the king and the queen had restored all their favourites and the old sense of uneasiness that the king was badly advised was justified once again by the new carving-up of the Yorkist lands and posts. Wavering supporters who had admired the good judgement and rule of Richard Duke of York, who had benefited under the protector’s order, justice and peace, were alienated by this wholesale return of the House of Lancaster. These were men who were by nature royalists; but in the face of this wilful provocation they would feel driven to become the reluctant allies of Richard Duke of York.

  THE COUSINS AT WAR

  The king and queen announced that they were calling a great council to meet in the queen’s favoured town of Leicester, in the heartlands of Lancastrian power – it was significant that they felt safer in the Midlands than in their own capital city of London. Pointedly, the Yorkist house and supporters were excluded from the council, and not invited to the meeting. Richard Duke of York, who had served so well as protector, resigning his power as agreed, was not even to be admitted to offer his advice in the royal council. York and his allies, suspecting that they were to be publicly humiliated again or worse, broke their oaths of loyalty to the king, and mustered their followers. The king’s party demanded they lay down their arms; the Yorkists refused to do so unless they too were invited to the council. Jacquetta and the queen stayed in Westminster as the king moved out of London and went slowly north, recruiting forces on his way to the council meeting at Leicester. York came south faster than anyone had expected and took up battle-ready positions around St Albans, a small town twenty-five miles north of London. Messages went to and fro and King Henry raised his banner, as if to prepare for battle, in the centre of the town.

  It was all over within half an hour. Richard Duke of York led his men in a frontal assault against the royal army barriers which tried to hold him out of the town, while the forces of his ally, Richard Neville Earl of Warwick, fought from street to street, coming into the town by little lanes and through the gardens, surprising the royal army, who were not ready for battle, not yet armed as Warwick’s men entered the town. The Earl of Warwick may have deliberately targeted Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset. The favoured duke was killed, trying to fight his way out of an inn where he had taken refuge. Shockingly, the king himself was abandoned by his personal guard and wounded by an arrow in his neck. Richard Duke of York found the royal banner propped against a wall and the wounded king in a tanner’s shop having his neck bandaged. The Duke of York knelt, in a show of fealty, before the wounded king.

  On hearing the alarming news of the defeat, the queen took her two-year-old son and, probably attended by Jacquetta, fled into the Tower of London and prepared for a siege. She was deeply distressed by the death of her dear friend Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset, and appalled at the thought that the Duke of York and his allies would now take control of the kingdom. She was right to fear them. They escorted the king to London, Richard Duke of York on his right hand, Richard Neville Earl of Salisbury on his left, Neville’s son, the 27-year-old Richard Earl of Warwick, proudly leading the way, holding the king’s sword. When they reached London everything was turned upside down again. Richard Duke of York seized the post of Constable of England, and Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, named himself as captain of the castle at Calais, where the garrison, still under the command of Richard Woodville Lord Rivers, promptly and courageously refused to admit him.

  Jacquetta probably stayed with the queen when she came out of the Tower of London and had to obey the orders of Richard Duke of York. He sent her first to Windsor Castle, and then even further afield: twenty miles north of London, to Hertford Castle, with her son, Prince Edward, and the king. They would have observed that the king was shocked by his first violent taste of warfare and was becoming ill again. Three doctors attended him and he signed over his beloved colleges, Eton and King’s Cambridge, as if he feared he could not continue to oversee them. The king attended the summer parliaments, though York suggested that the queen should stay out of London. She obeyed him and went to Greenwich Palace. Sometime this year Jacquetta probably left the troubled court to stay with her daughter Elizabeth as she gave birth to her first child, a boy: Thomas Grey. Jacquetta herself also had a baby boy this year – Edward Woodville – while her husband, far away over the narrow seas (the English Channel) still held the garrison of Calais for the defeated king, with little prospect of relief and no opportunity to come home. These must have been dark and frightening times for Jacquetta.

  By November of 1455 the king was clearly once again too ill to govern and York was invited to be protector by a parliament that preferred a strong regent to a weak king in uncertain health, and was afraid of popular unrest in the country generally, and specifically riots in the West Countr
y. The queen requested that her husband be sent to her at Greenwich, and cared for him there, while creating a court party around herself and her son.

  The king now experienced periods of good health interspersed with mental illness. He did not fall asleep again but he was depressed and quiet. He recovered enough in the spring of 1456 to end the protectorate but this time he did not replace the Duke of York’s appointees with those of his own choosing, instead leaving them in place. Jacquetta’s husband, Richard Woodville Lord Rivers, was finally released from his command of Calais when the king commanded that Warwick should be admitted as Captain of Calais, and those mutinous soldiers who had seized the merchants’ stocks of wool and closed the door to the Yorkist lords should be pardoned. Apparently, the king had decided to rule alongside Richard Duke of York, and when a Scottish invasion threatened, it was Richard Duke of York who mustered arms and rode north as Henry’s champion.

  In the summer of 1456 the king and queen made a progress around the most staunchly loyal area of the country, the Midlands, and Jacquetta was among the ladies in attendance when they entered Coventry. Her husband, Sir Richard, safely returned from Calais, was probably with her, in attendance on the king. The queen requested that the city show her the honours due to a reigning king, and not those appropriate for a queen and consort. This was an extraordinary demand; and later historians would regard it as Margaret seeking inappropriate power and behaving in an ‘unwomanly’ manner. But at the time her favourite city did not refuse her, acknowledging her power and giving her a state entry suitable for a king. Jacquetta, in the train of her friend and queen, would have witnessed the extra honour that Margaret was now claiming as her due.

  Coventry, the third city of England, was to become the new centre of government for a king who now spent much of his time on retreat in religious houses, and a queen who was openly disliked by the increasingly unruly capital city of London. No parliament was called in this period, and so no parliamentary taxes were levied; the royal household fell deeper into debt. Yorkist appointments were quietly replaced with the friends and supporters of the queen, and the king was widely regarded in the country as being ‘simple-minded’: under the control of his wife.

  Matters deteriorated further in 1457 with the queen creating a network of adherents across the country, and putting her supporters into local-government posts while London suffered riots, pirates raided shipping in the Channel, and the French forayed into Kent under the leadership of the glamorous Pierre de Brézé, a known friend of the queen’s. To add a sarcastic insult to injury the French force under de Brézé first plundered and burned the town of Sandwich and then played a game of tennis among the smouldering ruins before sailing for home. The king appeared powerless to defend his coast; indeed many people believed that the queen had summoned the raid. Those losing faith in the monarchy looked instead for protection to the Yorkist lord the Earl of Warwick to defend the English coast with his formidable fleet from his base at Calais.

  JACQUETTA POSTED TO ROCHESTER

  Richard Woodville Lord Rivers was among the noblemen summoned by the queen to defend the vulnerable south coast: he was made constable of Rochester Castle on the River Medway in November 1457, and Jacquetta went with him to live in the great Norman castle. It would have quickly become apparent to the couple that they were not there to defend the coast from attacks by the French, but to prepare to repel an invasion from Calais, from their fellow countrymen led by the Yorkist commander the Earl of Warwick, who dominated the narrow seas, using the powerful base of Richard Woodville’s former command: the fortress of Calais.

  The king himself tried to end this stand-off, calling a great council which met in the tense city of London, ringed with 13,000 archers, in January 1458. His intention was to resolve the demands for vengeance by the young heirs of the Lancastrian lords killed at St Albans. They were so insistent that the Yorkist lords be held to account for the deaths of their fathers that there was a real danger that a series of blood feuds might develop. The lords called to account – the Duke of York, the Earl of Salisbury and the Earl of Warwick – came to London heavily armed and deeply suspicious. The Mayor and sheriffs of London armed themselves and patrolled the streets, trying to keep the angry retinues apart. Some believed that matters were so far gone that violence would break out when the two sides met at the council meeting.

  Extraordinarily, the king – whose idea this was, whose sweetness of temper it reflected, whose trust in the fundamental goodness of mankind was its inspiration – stayed away from the seething city until March, hoping that the council would meet and determine for itself what should be done. No friendly resolution emerged from this meeting of enemies until finally the king broke his self-imposed silence and proposed a financial settlement for those heirs who had lost their fathers, and a bond for the Yorkist lords to bind them over to keep the peace. York, Warwick and his father the Earl of Salisbury were also to pay for a chantry in memory of the dead of St Albans. The king then declared a ‘Loveday’ when there was to be a solemn procession to the cathedral of St Paul’s with the warring cousins parading, arm in arm.

  The young Duke of Somerset, injured at the first battle of St Albans, where his glamorous father Edmund Beaufort had been killed, walked hand in hand with the Earl of Salisbury. Behind them came the notoriously vindictive Duke of Exeter, hand in hand with the Earl of Warwick, the young commander at the battle whose guerrilla tactics had won the day and whose piracy still dominated the seas and Calais. Then came the king alone, crowned and robed, probably the only man with any genuine faith in the ceremony. Behind him came the queen, hand in hand with the man she now regarded as her bitter enemy: Richard Plantagenet Duke of York. Behind them came the courtiers, among them Jacquetta, probably pregnant with her last baby, Katherine. She walked beside her husband Lord Rivers, with as much faith in the parade as they could muster.

  The symbolism of the procession is interesting. The king walked alone, above controversy, as he should always be. Next came the queen. Traditionally, she should have appeared walking alone, like the king, superior to faction. Alternatively she could have been shown walking at his side or just behind him, representing mercy: the queen’s traditional role. But in this procession Margaret was not shown as acting like a queen; neither as an intercessor for pardon, nor as the neutral wife of the king, far above petty politics. Instead, she was shown as one of the combatants. She was publicly walking on the Lancastrian side. Though she was ostentatiously hand-fast with the Duke of York, symbolising their new-found friendship, her position publicly identified the two of them as former enemies. The procession was designed to show reconciliation and unity; but in fact it revealed some dangerous truths: that everyone knew exactly which side they were on, that they were prepared to line up to show it, and that the queen was on the side of Lancaster.

  Within a few months she would demonstrate this. She accused Warwick of using the base of Calais as a home for piracy, especially against the German merchants of the Hanseatic League, who should have been protected by a treaty with England. She summoned the earl to London to stand trial. Warwick arrived with 600 retainers, all fully armed, and complained after only one day that the inquiry was inspired by the malice of the queen. A riot broke out in the London streets and the queen herself ordered pikemen into the city to restore order, which they did by attacking aldermen and citizens of London. A few months later, in the autumn, Warwick, walking through the royal kitchens, was accidentally stabbed by the end of a spit. A fight broke out in the grounds of the royal palace, between the royal household and Warwick’s men, and the queen demanded that the council try him for treason and strip him of the captaincy of Calais. A kitchen boy was publicly accused of attempted murder, but then privately smuggled away, probably by agents of the queen. Jacquetta witnessed the queen descend from her role, which should have been far above faction, to become a participant in a brawl.

  Boldly, Warwick refused to be dismissed from Calais by the royal council and instead de
manded a ruling from the parliament that had appointed him to the captaincy. As he left the council chamber he was attacked by men in the liveries of the Duke of Somerset and the Earl of Wiltshire – a genuine assassination attempt this time, almost certainly ordered by the queen. Warwick fought his way out and withdrew to Calais to prepare to defend himself by arms if necessary, and the queen, probably accompanied by Jacquetta, left London to build up her support in the Lancastrian heartlands of the Midlands.

  The Loveday would prove to be a tragic landmark. It was the last time the king commanded all his nobles to act in concert. The following year saw him either in retreat at abbeys, or under the influence of the queen, keeping a distance from London. The queen’s enmity to the lords who had affiliated with Richard Duke of York was now explicit.

  Margaret created a livery for her son the prince – the swan’s badge, the traditional insignia for the House of Lancaster. It was based on the mythical story of a magical woman who marries a man and gives him beautiful sons who each wear a collar of gold around their throats. Her spiteful mother-in-law replaces the children with dogs and the husband blames his wife for losing the children; but in fact she has changed them for their own safety into swans who can be identified from the wild flock by their gold collars. At the end of the story all their sons return to them but for one prince who stays as a gold-collared swan. The legend was rewritten as the story of the Swan Knight in the Camelot legends. Margaret was invoking ancient myth as part of building loyalty to her son. At a metaphorical level perhaps she was also seeing herself as the mysterious woman (like Melusina) who comes into the world of men, and whose son is in danger and whose place in the world is challenged.

  She took this promotion of her son to the extreme when she publicly suggested that he should be made king, and his father, Henry VI, abdicate. Although some lords supported this suggestion the king refused to abdicate his throne; but other than this defence of his position, he took very little part in the deteriorating circumstances, spending much of the autumn on religious retreat. In his absence, the queen maintained her own household, and Jacquetta would have served her through the anxious days of the spring of 1459. Some historians describe a queen intent on seizing power; Jacquetta may have seen a woman quite alone, not yet thirty, struggling to rule over a divided country, with no authority and little support, trying to preserve the safety and inheritance of her son, with a husband increasingly absent in mind and sometimes in body.