The Women of the Cousins’ War

by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin

  King Edward intended to incorporate Lancastrian Eton, which was still unfinished, into St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and obtained a papal bull authorising him to do so in 1463. All Henry VI’s grants were revoked in Edward’s first parliament, and the building was stripped of its bells, furniture and other valuables. No more might have been heard of it, but in 1467 Edward suddenly relented, restored some income, and petitioned the Pope to cancel the bull. There is no direct evidence that Elizabeth was responsible for his change of heart; but she could not have forgotten that her own family had once been deeply committed to Henry VI and may have wanted to preserve the best of his legacy. Present-day scholars may owe her more than they think.

  Elizabeth Woodville (lower right foreground), Edward IV, Bishop Thomas Rotherham and Cecily Neville, kneeling with other members of the confraternity before the Trinity. The Luton Guild Book, c. 1475

  One way in which the great and the good could express their devotion to their faith was by patronising religious institutions, and Elizabeth was no exception. She obtained a licence to establish a fellowship of the Trinity at Leadenhall in London intended to support sixty priests in March 1466, and later founded a chapel dedicated to St Erasmus (the protector of sailors and women in childbirth) in Westminster Abbey, almost certainly in gratitude for her husband’s preservation during his nail-biting voyage into exile in 1470 and for the successful delivery of the Prince of Wales. Like earlier queens, she became an honorary member of religious guilds (including the London Skinners’ Company’s Fraternity of Our Lady’s Assumption, and the Holy Trinity Guild, Luton), and took a close personal interest in the two great religious houses situated near Sheen Palace, the Carthusian charterhouse and the Bridgettine Abbey of Syon. In 1477 she was granted the privilege of attending services in all the Carthusian order’s houses that had been founded by kings and queens of England, and two years later gave the prior of the Sheen charterhouse, John Ingleby (who was to become one of her executors), forty-three acres of land from her manor there.

  Elizabeth also went on pilgrimages, partly to show her contrition for her failings, but perhaps equally to share in the camaraderie and ‘holiday atmosphere’ that characterised jaunts of this nature. Chaucer’s pilgrims were journeying to St Thomas Becket’s tomb for the good of their souls, but no one who reads The Canterbury Tales could doubt that they were determined to enjoy themselves in the process! Elizabeth’s pilgrimages were restricted to holy sites in England – principally Canterbury and the shrine of Our Lady of Walsingham (Norfolk) – but Jerusalem, Rome and Compostela were magnets for her aesthetic brother Anthony. It was after visiting Rome in 1476 that he was robbed of his jewels and plate at Torre di Baccano, about twelve miles north of the city, and was obliged to delay his journey while efforts were made to recover them. Elizabeth sent him letters of exchange worth 400 ducats to help pay his expenses and assist his passage home.

  A queen would not usually interfere in wider religious matters, but there was one occasion when Elizabeth was able to use her position and influence to extricate her subjects from a particular spiritual difficulty. The recently proclaimed feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary fell close to two other religious festivals observed in England, and in 1480 Elizabeth petitioned the Pope to allow English men and women to observe it in private without forfeiting any spiritual benefits. The Pope granted special indulgences to those who said the Angelical Salutation (Hail Mary) three times daily ‘because the queen desires the devotion of the faithful of the realm for the said salutation to be increased’.

  Medieval people sometimes had a rather mechanical approach to their faith – reflected in their routine offering of the mass-penny, for example – but no one thought that religion was an anachronism or that they would not be held accountable for their sins. It is never easy to decide how much of an individual’s piety was conventional as opposed to profoundly personal, but there seems little doubt that Elizabeth’s convictions were genuine and that she would have thanked God for the many blessings she believed He had bestowed upon her. Her worldly responsibilities and the unkind things said about her have tended to obscure this aspect of her character, and both her mother-in-law, Cecily Neville, and the ‘Red Queen’, Margaret Beaufort, have been more admired for their devotion to their religion. But no one fought harder for her son, the future Henry VII, than Margaret, and few died possessing greater wealth.

  But could Elizabeth have been both a committed Christian and a witch who cast spells to achieve her objectives? We need, I think, to distinguish between witchcraft as an alternative religion, and the use of magic to foretell the future or harm an enemy. On one level, it allowed intelligent but unsophisticated minds to explain the otherwise inexplicable, while at the same time enabling them to rid society of those who (it was always assumed) were intrinsically evil. We saw in the first part of this book how, only a few years after Elizabeth was born, Eleanor Cobham, wife of Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, Henry VI’s uncle and heir apparent, was accused of using dubious methods to discover if her husband would succeed to the throne and she would become queen. She failed to appreciate that such enquiries were tantamount to hoping that the king would die, and Duke Humphrey’s enemies made the most of their opportunity. She was punished by being made to carry a lighted taper through London’s streets before being consigned to life imprisonment, and the case shows how readily what may have been no more than idle curiosity could be misconstrued.

  Eleanor’s marriage to Duke Humphrey was dissolved on the grounds that she had used her secret powers to persuade him to marry her, and it is no coincidence that Elizabeth’s mother Jacquetta faced similar accusations when Warwick the Kingmaker tried to destroy the Woodvilles in 1469. It was almost impossible to prove that such charges were untrue or unjustified, and they were music to the ears of those who wanted to discredit the victim and those associated with her. Elizabeth was not mentioned in the indictment brought against her mother, and was only implicated fourteen years later when Richard of Gloucester accused her of withering his arm and of using sorcery to bewitch King Edward. Richard, in the words of the Tudor historian Polydore Vergil, claimed that ‘by the space of a few days past, neither night nor day can I rest, drink, nor eat, wherefore my blood by little and little decreaseth, my force faileth, my breath shorteneth, and all the parts of my body do above measure, as you see (and with that he showed them his arm), fall away; which mischief verily proceedeth in me from that sorceress Elizabeth the queen, who with her witchcraft has so enchanted me that by the annoyance thereof I am dissolved’.

  No one believed him, of course – Thomas More remarked that his arm was ‘ever such since his birth’ and ‘well they [the assembled lords] wist that the queen was too wise to go about any such folly’ – but he returned to the attack in Titulus Regius, the statute that established his right to the throne. This declared that the ‘ungracious pretensed marriage’ between his brother and Elizabeth ‘was made . . . by sorcery and witchcraft, committed by the said Elizabeth and her mother, Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, as the common opinion of the people and the public voice and fame is through all this land’. He offered to prove this ‘in time and place convenient’, if anyone should doubt him – although that seems to have been the end of the matter, at least as far as he was concerned.

  So was Elizabeth really a witch, or was this just another, rather crude, attempt to blacken her reputation? Her supposed descent from the water goddess Melusina may have made her more susceptible to such allegations, and her marriage to King Edward defied rational, logical explanation. But suspicion is, in the last resort, all we have to go on, and it would be both irrational and illogical to ‘convict’ her without a shred of real evidence. She had undoubtedly bewitched Edward, but perhaps not in the way that Richard and some of his contemporaries supposed!

  ELIZABETH AND HER IN-LAWS

  Elizabeth’s relations with some of her in-laws, notably her mother-in-law Cecily Neville, her two brothers-in-law George Duke of Clarence an
d Richard Duke of Gloucester, and her son-in-law Henry VII, were – in time-honoured fashion – far from easy. This section will try to explain how the dissensions arose and assess the damage they inflicted, but will not seek to apportion blame for them. All four treated her harshly on occasion, and she had to contend with one or more of them for her entire reign and beyond.

  Elizabeth’s relations with her mother-in-law were probably always doomed to failure. Cecily and her husband, Richard Duke of York, would almost certainly have been crowned king and queen if the duke had not been slain at Wakefield on 30 December 1460, and her son Edward’s victory could not entirely compensate for the cruel manner in which her own royal title had been snatched from her. The Yorkists might treat her with the respect due to a queen or queen-dowager, but she would have been acutely aware that this was a courtesy rather than a right.

  Cecily would have been prepared to bow the knee to a daughter-in-law born into one of the great royal families of Europe, but a Northamptonshire knight’s girl was an entirely different matter. Dominic Mancini says she was so angry when Edward told her he had married Elizabeth that she ‘fell into such a frenzy, that she offered to submit to a public enquiry and asserted that Edward was not the offspring of her husband the Duke of York, but was conceived in adultery, and therefore in no wise worthy of the honour of kingship’. The allegation that Edward was illegitimate (probably because he had been born at Rouen, outside England) was an old chestnut, and Mancini, who was writing in 1483, cannot have known what Cecily was supposed to have said almost twenty years earlier. But there is no reason to doubt his belief that there was animosity between the two women, or that frosty interviews like that described in The White Queen actually took place.

  When news of Edward’s victory at Towton on Palm Sunday 1461 was brought to Cecily, one of those present, Nicholas O’Flanagan, Bishop of Elphin, wrote to the papal legate Francesco Coppini urging him not only to send congratulations to the king but also to write to his mother ‘who has a great regard for you, and can rule the king as she pleases’. Their relationship was bound to change, at least formally, after Edward married, but he acknowledged his mother’s special position by building new apartments for Elizabeth at Westminster, presumably so that Cecily did not have to vacate the rooms she had occupied for the previous three years. It has been assumed that Cecily’s absence from both Elizabeth’s coronation in 1465 and her husband the Duke of York’s reburial at Fotheringhay in 1476 was to avoid any dispute with Elizabeth over precedence, but this is by no means certain. Kings and queens did not usually attend their spouses’ coronations or funerals at this period, and she may have deliberately absented herself to emphasise her queenly status in Yorkist eyes.

  Cecily’s influence may also have been at work when her younger son Richard of Gloucester and other lords and prelates met at her London town house, Baynard’s Castle, to discuss the terms of Edward IV’s will. They decided to deprive Elizabeth (and presumably her brother Anthony) of any role the late king had desired for them, and to effectively remove the young prince, now Edward V, from the influence of his mother’s family. Baynard’s Castle may have been no more than a convenient venue for these deliberations, but it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Cecily concurred with this decision and was happy to facilitate it. Elizabeth Woodville would play no part in a minority government if she had any say in the matter, and she may not have been displeased when Richard deposed young Edward and took the throne.

  Richard of Gloucester’s relationship with his mother has itself been subject to debate and to differing interpretations. Remarkably, he first sought to justify his assumption of power by reviving the story that his elder brother King Edward had been conceived in adultery, before, apparently, changing his mind and basing his claim on the alleged invalidity of Edward’s marriage to Elizabeth. Cecily would surely have resented having her reputation besmirched in this manner (which may be one reason why the excuse was altered), but she seems to have remained on good terms with Richard. A letter he wrote to her in 1484 asking her to appoint his chamberlain, Francis Lovell, to an office in Wiltshire was couched in the formal language a king would have used on every occasion but contains no hint of animosity:

  Madam, I recommend me to you as heartily as is to me possible, beseeching you in my most humble and effectual wise [manner] of your daily blessing to my singular comfort and defence in my need. And madam I heartily beseech you that I may often hear from you to my comfort. And madam, I beseech you to be [a] good and gracious lady to my lord, my chamberlain, to be your officer in Wiltshire . . . I trust he shall therein do you good service and that it please you that by this bearer I may understand your pleasure in this behalf. And I pray God send you the accomplishment of your noble desires. Written at Pontefract the third day of June with the hand of your most humble son, Ricardus Rex.

  Both Elizabeth and Cecily lived for another decade, but any contact between them was minimal. After a brief period of rehabilitation at the beginning of Henry VII’s reign (see below) Elizabeth was sent to Bermondsey Abbey, while Cecily seldom left her home at Berkhampstead Castle after Richard was killed at Bosworth. Elizabeth stood godmother to her first grandson, her daughter Elizabeth’s son Prince Arthur, when he was baptised in September 1486, but Cecily, the infant’s great-grandmother, was again absent. Two mistresses in the house was perhaps always one too many!

  George Duke of Clarence, Elizabeth’s elder brother-in-law, had been born close to a throne but had no real prospect of inheriting it. He was his brother Edward’s heir for most of the 1460s (it is unlikely that any of the king’s three infant daughters would have been allowed to succeed him), but betrayed his dissatisfaction and impatience when he accepted his father-in-law Warwick’s offer to make him king in 1470. Warwick failed to deliver however – the ‘Lincolnshire Rebellion’ ended in failure – and his subsequent reconciliation with Queen Margaret and the House of Lancaster meant that George would now realise his ambition only if Henry VI and his son Prince Edward both died childless. It was probably this, as much as any other factor, that persuaded him to rejoin King Edward before the battle of Barnet, and allowed him to finish on the winning side.

  George resumed his position at court after his brother’s final victory at Tewkesbury, but remained disgruntled and continued to look for ways of improving his prospects. As early as 1472 he was suspected of conspiring with his wife’s surviving uncle, Archbishop George Neville, and the exiled Lancastrian Earl of Oxford, and when, in the next year, Oxford attempted to invade England, he assured Louis XI that he had the support of twenty-four lords, knights and gentlemen and one duke. He may have meant the Duke of Exeter, who had his own, distant Lancastrian claim to the throne and whom Edward IV had never trusted; but George Duke of Clarence cannot be ruled out.

  George supposed that because he was married to the Earl of Warwick’s elder daughter Isabel he would succeed to his late father-in-law’s lands (on behalf of his wife), and that the vast Beauchamp-Despenser inheritance of the widowed Countess of Warwick would also pass to him. In normal circumstances, if there was no son to inherit, a deceased’s property would be divided equally among his or her surviving daughters, but Anne, Isabel’s younger sister, had been married to Prince Edward of Lancaster as part of the agreement reached between her father Warwick and the boy’s mother, Queen Margaret, in France. Prince Edward’s death at Tewkesbury had left Anne a young widow with no one to defend her interests; but all this changed when Richard of Gloucester, George’s younger brother, announced that he intended to marry her and claim her half share of the inheritance. The Croyland chronicler says that George disguised Anne as a cookmaid to prevent Richard from finding her; but Richard sought her out, lodged her in sanctuary, and appealed to the king.

  It would be tedious to describe the unedifying, often bitter, dispute between the two royal brothers, but the settlement which they and King Edward finally agreed between them was as immoral as it was illegal. We have already seen how young George Nevi
lle, Warwick’s nephew, was prevented from succeeding to the lands his uncle had settled on him, and how the Countess of Warwick was declared to be legally dead so that her daughters (and their husbands) could inherit her lands immediately. The countess protested to anyone who would listen, but her husband had died a traitor and she had few friends.

  Edward wanted to restore harmony in the royal family so that he could mount a new expedition to recover Henry V’s French empire, and both George and Richard joined him in what proved to be an abortive sortie into France in 1475. They returned wealthier, bought off by Louis XI’s offer of personal pensions coupled with lucrative trade and marriage agreements, but George was left to reflect that all the money in the world could not buy him the crown he so longed for. Matters finally came to a head when their brother-in-law, Charles of Burgundy, was killed in battle at Nancy on 4 January 1477. Duke Charles had fought long and hard to create a new ‘middle kingdom’ of Burgundy, independent of both Germany to the east and France to the west, and his widow Duchess Margaret suggested that Mary, her late husband’s daughter and heiress, could secure her territories against King Louis by marrying George, whose wife, Isabel, had also died a few weeks before.