Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  Perhaps Margaret, even then, was trying to invent for herself a scenario to mask the unpalatable fact that, in reality, she would have had no choice in the matter. She was, essentially, fooling herself—likely struggling with the realities of a girl’s destiny, or simply trying to cast the glow of divine approval over her son, Henry. Perhaps, indeed, the story was only later Tudor propaganda, designed to reinforce the message that they were a divinely ordained dynasty. Between the annulment of Margaret’s marriage and the ascension of the Tudors some thirty years later, there would be a great many turns in the Wheel of Fortune—turns that might have produced an entirely different outcome for England.

  _______________

  *This was the theory behind the Arthurian legend of the Fisher King.

  4

  “NO WOMEN’S MATTERS”

  Madam, the king is old enough himself

  To give his censure. These are no women’s matters.

  HENRY VI, PART 2, 1.3

  The court party of Henry VI was about to get another, unexpected, boost—one that, ironically, made Margaret Beaufort’s marriage a matter of a little less urgency. That spring of 1453, Queen Marguerite was, at long last, able to announce a pregnancy—the news that the king’s “most dearly beloved wife the Queen was enceinte,” to his “most singular consolation,” as his official proclamation had it.

  Marguerite can have had no doubt to whom to give thanks. She had recently been on pilgrimage to Walsingham, where the shrine of Our Lady was believed to be particularly helpful to those trying to conceive, and she had already made a new year’s offering of a gold tablet with the image of an angel, bedecked with jewels. On the way back, she had stayed a night at Hitchin with Cecily Neville, wife of the still alienated Richard of York. Now, in the summer of 1453, Cecily wrote to Marguerite praising “that blessed Lady to whom you late prayed, in whom aboundeth plenteously mercy and grace, by whose mediation it pleased our Lord to fulfil your right honourable body of the most precious, most joyful, and most comfortable earthly treasure that might come unto this land.”

  But Cecily was not writing only to congratulate Marguerite—nor even to lament the infirmity of her own “wretched body,” which she bemoaned in the same letter. Cecily was indeed recovering from the birth of her son Richard; Thomas More wrote that it was a breech birth, and Cecily could not be delivered “uncut.” But also on the forefront of Cecily’s mind was her husband’s fall from favor, which caused her to be “replete with such immeasurable sorrow and heaviness as I doubt not will of the continuance thereof diminish and abridge my days, as it does my worldly joy and comfort.” She would have made her plea to Marguerite earlier had not “the disease and infirmity that since my said being in your highness presence hath grown and groweth” caused her “sloth and discontinuance.” In this long, elaborate, and convoluted letter, Cecily renews the suit she had made at Hitchin: that her husband, the Duke of York, should no longer be “estranged from the grace and benevolent favour of that most Christian, most gracious and most merciful prince, the king our sovereign lord.”

  It is unclear whether York, estranged from court and out of favor, asked Cecily to intercede, or whether this advance was on Cecily’s own initiative. The lists of the gifts Marguerite gave each year show presents made to Cecily and her servants, and we can choose to see such female recipients being used as a less politically coded conduit to their husbands, or as another kind of female alliance, based on sisterhood and liking. Either way, Cecily’s letter may possibly have had some effect. When a great council was summoned that autumn, York did, belatedly, receive an invitation to attend. One of the signatories on the document was Marguerite’s confessor.

  The council was first summoned by Margaret Beaufort’s uncle Somerset on October 24, 1453. But in the weeks before that date, several important things had happened, as Cecily may or may not have been aware when she wrote to Marguerite. On October 19, the French king’s forces had entered Bordeaux, leaving England only Calais as a foothold in France and ending the “Hundred Years’ War” with France’s resounding victory. Six days earlier, on October 13, Queen Marguerite had given birth to a healthy baby boy, named Edward, after Edward the Confessor, whose feast day it was. But while proclamations of the joyous news were read around the country, at court at least the joy was muted. The man to whom the news should have been most welcome of all, the baby’s father, Henry VI, had fallen into a catatonic stupor.

  It had been the middle of August when the king, after complaining one evening of feeling unusually sleepy, had awoken the next morning with a lolling head, unable to move or to communicate with anybody. Over the days and then weeks ahead, as his physicians and indeed priests tried the full panoply of fifteenth-century remedies—bleedings, purgings, and cautery on the one hand, exorcism on the other—he seemed not entirely to lose consciousness, but to be utterly incapable. Modern medicine has tentatively diagnosed his condition as catatonic schizophrenia, or alternatively a depressive stupor—triggered, perhaps, by the news from France or just possibly by the thought of Marguerite’s pregnancy, which may have come as an unpleasant shock to the notoriously ascetic king.

  Every effort was made, at first, to conceal the king’s condition, not only from the country at large but also from York himself. And it was in this tense climate that, sometime before the expected birth, Marguerite, as custom dictated, had withdrawn into her apartments at Westminster to await her child’s birth, passing into an all-female world, which not even her priest was allowed to enter.

  Never can withdrawal from the wider world have seemed less timely, and one can only wonder which, as she waited in the darkened rooms, seemed the more pressing danger—the unknowable outcome of the situation outside or the well-known dangers of the birth ahead. And although Marguerite weathered the birth as she had her other English trials, the situation outside was no less fraught when she emerged. After the baby had been delivered—and after the churching some forty days later at which Marguerite, wearing a robe trimmed with more than five hundred sables, was attended by the duchesses not only of Suffolk and Somerset but also of York—she had to accept the fact that Henry in his catatonic state could make no sign of acknowledging the baby as his. The king’s obliviousness not only was something that could be presented as a personal slight, but also constituted a practical problem if the name of the little prince were to be invoked as nominal authority of a council to rule during his father’s incapacity.

  There would, perhaps inevitably, be rumors about the baby’s paternity, whispers that Marguerite had been guilty of adultery with the Duke of Somerset.* If it were indeed the news of Marguerite’s pregnancy that had triggered the king’s collapse, then the question is whether he were horrified by the first indisputable evidence of his own sexuality or, conversely, by awareness the child could not be his and that his wife must have been unfaithful. It was the same slur that would be leveled at Cecily, but this time—given the unhappiness of Marguerite’s marital situation, her husband’s presumed lack of virility, and the more suitable choice of the alleged partner—it does seem at least a more realistic possibility.

  Adultery in the queen would be an outrage to the whole country. It is true that by the traditions of courtly love, adultery could be a forgivable, even in some senses a laudable, route to emotional fulfillment. Thomas Malory’s celebrated character Guenivere was guilty of adultery with Lancelot (while her husband, Arthur, soon to fall into his own magic sleep below the lake, stood by; because Guenivere was Lancelot’s true lover, however, she was therefore able to be redeemed—to have “a good end”). In the world of practical politics, however, it was a different story. When chroniclers such as Robert Fabian wrote that “false wedlock and false heirs fostered” were the “first cause” of the ills in the body politic, they were making an equation between public well-being and private morality that would have seemed reasonable to any contemporary.

  The whispers of unfaithfulness would be fanned into a flame of public debate toward the en
d of the decade, when Marguerite’s Yorkist enemies found it convenient both to discredit the Lancastrian heir and to cast a slur on Marguerite herself in the field in which women were above all judged: her chastity. As Catherine de Medici would later warn Elizabeth I, her sexuality was always the way in which a powerful woman could be most successfully attacked. Christine de Pizan similarly suggested that a queen had less freedom of sexual action at least than a lower-ranking lady, for “the greater a lady is, the more is her honour or dishonour celebrated through the country.”

  But whatever the damage such rumors did her, the birth of little Prince Edward had significantly advanced Marguerite’s standing—as she well knew. It transformed Marguerite into the first of several women in this story for whom their sons would be the ones to play. Marguerite would now not be prepared to sit back and allow others to rule the country during her husband’s incapacity.

  In January 1454, a Paston correspondent reported that the queen had made a bill of five articles—“whereof the first is that she desires to have the whole rule of the land.” No wonder contemporaries saw her as, in the words of the sixteenth-century chronicler Hall, “a manly woman, using to rule and not be ruled.” There was in England no very recent precedent for a woman’s rule, or indeed a formal regency, albeit that, in the great fictional work of these years, when Malory’s King Arthur went away to the wars, he had “resigned all rule” to certain of his lords “and Queen Guenivere.” In sober fact, however, though several of the early Norman queens had acted as regent, memories of Isabella of France were not reassuring. The last woman to hold the reins of power, a century before, Isabella had deposed and perhaps murdered her husband, Edward II, taking over the whole rule of the country, with her lover, in the name of her young son. Marguerite’s mother-in-law, Katherine de Valois, had taken no part in government during Henry VI’s minority.

  The lands across the Channel offered precedent aplenty. Marguerite’s family tradition was of women taking control when necessary—deputizing for a husband during his absence, or a son during his minority. But severe disapproval, and perhaps more, awaited the woman who crossed the indefinable bound and seemed to seek rule openly. Perhaps Marguerite’s very bid, influenced by the experience of her Continental family, would have repercussions when, almost thirty years later, the governors of England came to consider the position of another, a Woodville, queen during her son’s minority.

  Discussions as to how the country should be ruled dragged on for weeks, in Parliament and in the council chamber, which suggests that Marguerite’s claim was not instantly dismissed. When, one week at the end of February, both she and York were scheduled to make grand public arrivals in London, the mayor and aldermen of the City were faced with the problem of showing them both equal respect. They agreed to turn out in scarlet to give the queen a formal welcome on Wednesday—and to do precisely the same for the Duke of York on Friday. In the end, however, in the last days of March, the final decision was that the country would be governed, during the king’s incapacity, by a council of nobles, with York as “protector” at their head. It was a decision on which all the men involved—even Henry VI’s half brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor—could agree.

  York was described also as “defensor” of the realm—a military role that could only have been held by a man. Somerset was disempowered—arrested in the queen’s apartment—and Marguerite was sent to Windsor to be with her husband, as a wife, not a force in the land. She seemed to accept the decision, however, even when the council’s money-saving reforms reduced her household and thus her power base. It is hard, indeed, to know what else she could have done. Certainly, she could not have stressed Henry’s incapacity; she had no authority to act other than through him. Although some lords refused to serve on York’s council on the grounds that they were “with the queen,” either physically or otherwise, the normal business of administration seemed—except only for the continued opposition of Somerset—to be going comparatively smoothly.

  Then, on Christmas Day 1454, Henry recovered his senses. On December 28, the queen brought her son to him and told him the baby’s name, and (in the words of the Paston letters) “he held up his hands and thanked God therefore.” Another account has it that he also, unhelpfully, said the child “must be the son of the Holy Spirit,” which could not but fan the flames of any doubts about the boy’s paternity.

  The king’s recovery was hailed as a relief to all. In truth, however, it only presented a new set of problems. York had been a capable governor, but now a weak king was back on the throne, and his recovery had also resurrected Somerset, boiling with fury. The weakened Henry would thenceforth be more susceptible than ever to his wife’s petticoat government, which boded ill for York and perhaps for the country. York could only ride back to his own estates for safety, and with him, this time—morally, if not physically—came a great affinity: notably, Cecily’s brother, Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, and Neville’s eldest son, the Earl of Warwick. Warwick was an impressive figure who would go down in history as “the Kingmaker” and whose wife, two years later, would give birth to the most obscure female protagonist of this story: Anne.

  Up until the 1450s, the Neville family had continued to support the Lancastrian government, to which they were linked by the connections of Joan Beaufort. Cecily, married to York, must have found herself isolated within her own family. This had now begun to change, largely because of the repercussions of a feud with another great northern family. The Nevilles had long been locked into a land dispute with the Percy earls of Northumberland, and now Warwick, in particular, felt that Henry (and Somerset) was showing too much favor to the Percys. The result was that two different divisions of the Neville family were coming to be on opposite sides. Cecily, the former “Rose of Raby,” was now closest to the Nevilles of Middleham, Salisbury, and Warwick, who were realigning themselves with her husband, while her half nephew Ralph, who held the Raby land and the Westmorland title, remained Lancastrian. Whatever the cause, the change of allegiance in at least some of her kin must have been welcome to Cecily.

  The spring of 1455, and the recovery of Henry VI, triggered the start of what has come to be known as the “Cousins’ War.” In May 1455, the queen and Somerset held another great council charged with protecting the king “against his enemies.” The standoff between the two opposed parties quickly gave way to armed conflict, as the king (supported by Somerset, though not by the queen, who had retreated to Greenwich with her baby) rode out of London at the head of a royal army, and York, following the principle of getting his retaliation in first, likewise mustered his forces. The battle of St. Albans was no major military engagement—an hour-long fracas through the marketplace and the town’s principal street—but it was notable for two things. Contemporaries were shocked, not only by the fact that the victorious Yorkist soldiers were looting their way through an English town, but also by the fact that the king was slightly wounded, by an arrow from one of his English subjects. Notable too was the fact that a number of lords and gentlemen on the royal side were slain. Among them was the Duke of Somerset, cut down by an ax outside the Castle Inn. Once again Marguerite had lost a great ally (and Margaret Beaufort her uncle and the head of her family).

  It was York’s and the Nevilles’ victory. But the battle of St. Albans was significant in yet another way. There may not have been one single turning point in Marguerite of Anjou’s progress toward political activism, but this was the moment when the process was completed, surely. With her main supporter cut down in battle and her weak husband unable to offer any further resistance, Marguerite would have to take the fight to her enemies herself, and in whatever way she could.

  By and large, with a few notable exceptions, the battlefield was not part of a lady’s experience in the fifteenth century. Some thirty years before, legend had it, Margaret’s grandmother Yolande had donned silver armor and led her troops against the English at the battle of Baugé. Although the century of Joan of Arc may have given minim
al lip service to the idea of the woman warrior, even Isabella of Castile, Catherine of Aragon’s mother, often pictured as leading her own troops into battle, in fact confined herself to strategy and the supply of arms, planning, and provisioning. Certainly, most of the ladies whose husbands or sons were involved in conflict would have heard of the event only days or even weeks later. News traveled only at a horse’s pace, and in an age before mass media (before, even, the dissemination of official printed reports), they may never have known as much about the progress of each battle as we know today. The history of the “Wars” of the Roses has usually been told in terms of the men who alone could take part in its physical conflicts. But the lives of the women behind them could be affected as profoundly.

  As the Yorkists took over the reins of government, there was no overt breach of loyalty—everything was done in the king’s name. Past wrongs were blamed on the dead Somerset and his allies. But Marguerite at least was mistrustful and unhappy, leaving the court to take refuge in the Tower with her baby. The fact that Henry resumed his role as king almost as York’s puppet must have frightened as well as angered her.* More uncertainty lay ahead: that autumn the king fell ill again, though this time only for three months, and for that period, from November 1455 to the next February, York resumed his protectorship of the country.

  But as York set about a policy of, among other things, royal financial retrenchment, the queen was working to try to make the king’s nominal rule something closer to a reality. “The queen is a great and strong laboured woman, for she spares no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion to her power,” wrote one observer named John Bocking, a connection of the Paston family. Early in 1456, as the king’s recovery put an end to York’s protectorship yet again, Marguerite herself left London, taking her baby son to the traditional Lancashire stronghold of Tutbury.