Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  Marguerite had decided to take action. From Tutbury, she rallied support and persuaded the king to remove the court from London to the Midlands, where her own estates lay. In September of that year, her chancellor was entrusted by the king with the privy seal, which gave her access to the whole administration of the country.

  Marguerite postured herself always as the king’s “subordinate and adjunct,” which was what was needed in the short term. In the long term, however, this both acted to the detriment of her authority and left her vulnerable to charges of exceeding her brief. It was as Marguerite managed to accrue more power to herself that the rumors really began to circulate about her sexual morality, as if the two things were two sides of the same unnatural coin. It was increasingly said that the prince was not the king’s son but perhaps Somerset’s—or not even Marguerite’s child, but a changeling. In February 1456, one John Helton, “an apprentice at court,” was hung, drawn, and quartered “for producing bills asserting that Prince Edward was not the queen’s son.”

  The pageants that welcomed Marguerite into the city of Coventry on September 14, 1456, reflected the confusion about her role. The bulk of them saw her figured as traditionally female—mother and wife—and praised particularly for her “virtuous life.” (Considering the aspersions that had been cast upon her sexual virtue, it is likely a point was being made, if, as is possible, Marguerite herself had any hand in framing the images.) She was hailed, hopefully if inappropriately, as a “model of meekness, dame Margaret,” and though the ending made a show of the famously sword-wielding and dragon-slaying Saint Margaret, it was not before six famous conquerors had promised to give the saint’s less well-armed namesake their protection—of which, as a female, she clearly stood in need.

  BUT THAT AUTUMN the king called a council from which (so a correspondent of the Pastons wrote) the Duke of York withdrew “in right good conceit with the king, but not in great conceit with the Queen.” And when the next spring Marguerite paid another visit to Coventry, she was at the insistence of her officers escorted back out of the city by the mayor and sheriffs with virtually the same ceremonies that would have been accorded to the king, or so the city recorder noted with shock: “And so they did never before the Queen till then.” Only the parade of the king’s sword was missing.* By January 1457, while a council was appointed for Marguerite’s baby son, the queen herself ordered a huge stock of arms to the Midlands castle of Kenilworth. Marguerite was showing her hand ever more openly. With attention on Marguerite, no one at the time would have been inclined to look elsewhere, to another recent event—to others who, as they grew to womanhood, would later be important in the country’s history.

  On June 11, 1456, in Warwick Castle, just a few miles away from Kenilworth, the Earl of Warwick’s wife, Anne Beauchamp, had given birth to their second daughter, Anne. Anne Beauchamp had come unexpectedly (and not without familial strife) into a vast inheritance, and since the Warwicks never produced sons, their daughters, Isabel and Anne Neville, were early marked out as among the greatest heiresses of their day. Anne’s future would take her from one side to another of the York-Lancaster dispute, but at the moment (however close geographically they may have been to Marguerite), her father and her family were prominent in the Yorkist cause. It was in far-off Wales, at Pembroke Castle, that young Margaret Beaufort—Queen Marguerite’s namesake and fellow Lancastrian—was also about to have to take control of her own destiny.

  _______________

  *The whispers were enduring enough to be echoed by Shakespeare in Henry VI, Part 3, 2.2.

  *Again, there would perhaps be repercussions ahead when another queen, Elizabeth Woodville, had to contemplate the prospect of another Richard, another Yorkist duke, holding the effectual reins of the country.

  *Eighteen years later, Ferdinand of Aragon was shocked to hear that his wife, Isabella, had not only had herself proclaimed hereditary monarch of Castile, but also paraded through Segovia with a drawn sword carried before her. “I have never,” he protested, “heard of a queen who usurped this masculine attribute.”

  5

  “CAPTAIN MARGARET”

  Where’s Captain Margaret to fence you now?

  HENRY VI, PART 3, 2.6

  Almost two years earlier—in 1455, shortly after her uncle Somerset had been killed in the queen’s cause—Margaret Beaufort had reached her twelfth birthday. Until this time, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, it is likely that the young Margaret had been left still in her mother’s care. But when the king’s half brother Edmund Tudor was sent to Wales as the king’s representative late that year, he had almost certainly been able to take Margaret with him as his wife.

  Popular opinion would have suggested that consummation of the marriage should be delayed, even though it was now legal—the more so since Margaret was slight and undeveloped for her age. But other factors weighed more heavily on Edmund: the fact, perhaps, that fathering a child with Margaret would give him a life interest in her lands, or that although there was now a Lancastrian heir, there was still not a spare. She became pregnant in the first half of 1456, sometime before her thirteenth birthday. It would at the best have been an anxious time for her, but worse was to follow. Edmund did not live to see the birth of his child. Captured at Carmarthen by an ally of the Duke of York’s, he was soon released, but died there of plague in November 1456.

  ISOLATED IN PLAGUE-RIDDEN WALES, heavily pregnant, and thirteen, a terrified Margaret had only one ally close at hand: her brother-in-law Jasper Tudor, who, himself only in his early twenties, was called on to take on this quasi-paternal role. She fled to his stronghold of Pembroke, and it was there that on January 28, in the forbidding chill of a Welsh winter, she gave birth to a boy.

  The ceremony that was supposed to surround the birth of a possible heir to the throne was described in ordinances Margaret Beaufort herself would lay down in later life for the birth of her first grandchild, and though there was obviously more ritual about the confinement of a queen than a mere great lady, the essential goals were the same. The pregnant mother should go apart, some weeks before the birth, into the rooms carefully prepared: “Her Highness’s pleasure being understood as to what chamber it may please her to be delivered in, the same to be hung with rich cloth or arras, sides, roof, windows and all, except one window, which must be hanged so that she have light when it pleases her.” She took communion at a solemn mass, then progressed in state to her apartments, took wine and sweetmeats with her (male) officers, and then bade them farewell. As she entered her chamber, she passed into a world of women, where “women are to be made all manner of officers, butlers, sewers and pages; receiving all needful things at the chamber door.” A roughly contemporary illustration shows a world of color and comfort, with three ladies tending to the mother, while a fourth nurses the child before a blazing fire.

  After the birth, a new mother was to stay in bed, then to be allowed to walk around the room, then the rest of the house, until she went for her “churching,” or purification, some forty days after her accouchement, accompanied by midwives and female attendants, bearing a lighted candle, to be sprinkled with holy water. Christine de Pizan gives a description of the lying-in of one woman—a mere merchant’s wife, shockingly—who arranged that awestruck visitors should walk past an ornamental bed and a dresser “decorated like an altar” with silver vessels before even reaching her own bedchamber, “large and handsome,” with tapestries all around, and a bed made up with cobweb-fine display sheets, and even a gold-embroidered rug “on which one could walk” (this at a time when carpets were too expensive usually to placed on the floor). “Sitting in the bed was the woman herself, dressed in crimson silk, propped up against large pillows covered in the same silk and decorated with pearl buttons, wearing the headdress of a lady.” But it seems likely Margaret Beaufort’s circumstances militated against any such pleasurable feminine display.

  We know that women were as anxious then as now to take any precaution they could again
st the perils of childbirth, from a favorite midwife to the Virgin’s girdle. Even in a lower sphere of society, Margaret Paston was so eager to get the midwife she wanted that the woman—though incapacitated by a back injury—had to reassure her she’d be there, even if she had to be pushed in a barrow. What we do not know is to just what degree the conditions of the year or the remoteness of the place changed things for Margaret. But we know the birth did not go easily.

  The labor was long and difficult. Both Margaret and the child were expected to die, and were there to be a choice, some church authorities urged that those in attendance should prioritize the unbaptized baby, even if it was not a valuable boy. There seems little doubt her physical immaturity was part of the problem—as Fisher would later put it, “It seemed a miracle that of so little a personage anyone should have been born at all.” She herself thought so, at least: in later years, she would combine forces with her daughter-in-law, Elizabeth of York, to ensure that her young granddaughter and namesake, Margaret, was not sent to Scotland too early, lest her new husband, the king of Scotland, would not wait to consummate the marriage “but injure her, and endanger her health.”

  There seems little doubt that Margaret Beaufort was indelibly marked by her early experiences—perhaps physically (since neither of her two subsequent marriages produced any children) and certainly mentally. Contemporaries remarked on her sense of vulnerability. The image of Fortune’s Wheel was as impossible to avoid for contemporary commentators on this period as it is today. “But Fortune with her smiling countenance strange / Of all our purpose may make sudden change” ran the popular jingle, and no one was more aware than Margaret Beaufort of its lethal possibilities.

  For the rest of her life, the pall of mortality would hang heavily on Margaret Beaufort. After her death, her confessor, John Fisher, would say, in the Mornynge Remembraunce sermon he preached a month after her death, that “she never was yet in that prosperity but the greater it was the more always she dread the adversity.” Whenever “she had full great joy, she let not to say, that some adversity would follow.” (And this was despite the fact that the other early Tudor biographer, the court poet Bernard André, claimed that she was “steadfast and more stable than the weakness in women suggests.”) Perhaps, even, it would not be surprising if Margaret the devout turned with a sense of angry recognition to the religious theories of the day that held maidenhood and virginity to be the most perfect time of a woman’s life—or if she attempted, in her later rejection of the married state, almost to re-create it. Certainly, the iconography was all around: the Virgin Mary, the Maid of Orléans, the Pearl Maiden of poetry, even Galahad and the Grail. The nobly born virgin martyrs—Saints Catherine of Alexandria, Cecilia, Barbara, Agnes, Agatha, and Margaret—had become the most popular saints in the England of the day.

  But even the trauma she had suffered did not long subdue the young mother’s determination. We have few early proofs of Margaret Beaufort’s character, but this, if true, is one of them, surely: the sixteenth-century Welsh chronicler Elis Gruffydd claimed that Jasper had the baby christened Owen, but Margaret forced the officiating bishop to christen him again with a name allied to the English throne—Henry. The next few months—the time of her official period of mourning—would be spent at Pembroke and on the care of her delicate baby. But she had no intention of leaving the tides of the times to pass her by, at a moment when she must have known that they were flowing swiftly.

  The birth of her son impelled Margaret into speedy action. In March, almost as soon as she was churched and received back into public life, she and her brother-in-law Jasper were traveling toward Newport and the home of the Duke of Buckingham. A new marriage had to be arranged for her and an alliance that would protect her son. The choice fell on Henry Stafford, a mild man some twenty years older than she but, crucially, the second son of the Duke of Buckingham, a staunchly Lancastrian magnate and a man almost as powerful as the Duke of York (who, ironically, was his brother-in-law, since Anne, Duchess of Buckingham, was Cecily Neville’s sister). A dispensation was needed, since the pair were second cousins; by April 6 it had been applied for and granted, although the actual marriage ceremony would not take place until Margaret’s mourning was complete, on January 3, 1458.

  The bride, still only fourteen, would keep the grander title her first marriage had won her, Countess of Richmond, but she brought with her estates now enriched by her inheritance from Edmund Tudor. Her son, Henry Tudor, by contrast, would at first probably remain in Wales and in his uncle’s care. Nonetheless, this appears to have been a happy familial relation, with Margaret and her new husband visiting Jasper and baby Henry at Pembroke, with the elder Buckinghams welcoming their new daughter-in-law (Duchess Anne would bequeath Margaret several choice books), and—despite the absence of any further children—with every sign of contentment, at least, between the pair. Margaret would seem to have found a safe haven—except that events would not leave any haven tranquil and unmolested for long.

  IN THE SPRING OF 1458 the adversarial parties in the royal dispute were brought to the ceremony of formal reconciliation known as a “Loveday.” It was in everyone’s interest that some unity should be restored to the country. Queen Marguerite and the Duke of York walked hand in hand into church, to exhibit their amity before God. The pose showed queenly intercession, peacemaking, but it also cast Marguerite as York’s equal and political match. Ironically, what might sound to modern ears like a tribute to her activities was actually a devaluation of her status: as queen, she was supposed to be above the fray. To remain on that pedestal might keep her immobile, but to step down from it exposed her vulnerability.

  The pacific image was, moreover, misleading. The summer and autumn of 1458 saw fresh clashes between Marguerite and the Yorkists. She had Warwick summoned to London to account for acts of piracy he had committed while governor of Calais, to which post he had been appointed the previous year. He arrived with a large force of armed retainers wearing his livery, and his supporters rallied protests in the city against the queen and the authorities. Tensions deepened when Warwick narrowly escaped impalement on a spit as he passed through the royal kitchens. He claimed that the queen had paid the scullion to murder him. Later that year, Marguerite left London. She was assembling a personal army—what one report described as “queen’s gallants,” sporting the livery badge of her little son.

  A RANDOM LETTER PRESERVED in the archives of Exeter cathedral, concerning a snub to the Crown’s candidate for the deanery, gives a taste of Marguerite’s mood at this time. It had been reported that some of the chapter were inclined to set aside the royal recommendations “to our great marvel and displeasure if it be so,” she wrote. “Wherefore we desire and heartily pray you forthwith that for reverence of us . . . you will . . . be inclined and yield to the accomplishment of my lord’s invariable intention and our in this matter.” It is notable that Henry’s letter of confirmation was shorter and feebler and that the officer sent down to see that the royal will was done was Marguerite’s own master of jewels. But it is also notable, of course, that she was only able ever to act in the name of her husband—or even of her tiny son.

  Vergil says that the queen (who was, “for diligence, circumspection and speedy execution of causes, comparable to a man”) believed a plan was afoot to put the Duke of York on the throne itself, “Wherefore this wise woman [called] together the council to provide remedy for the disordered state of things.” A meeting of the council in Coventry in the summer of 1459 saw York, Warwick, and their adherents indicted for their nonappearance “by counsel of the queen.” Nominally, of course, the council was the king’s council, and it was he who was still ruling the country. But the queen’s dominance must have made it hard for many loyal Englishmen to be sure just where their loyalties lay.

  The anonymous English Chronicle declares that it was at this point that the Yorkists really began spreading rumors. “The queen was defamed and denounced, that he that was called prince, was not her son, but a
bastard gotten in adultery.” That, the chronicler believed, was why she felt it necessary to raise support for his claim, holding an “open household” among all the knights and squires of Cheshire.

  One anomaly of female leadership in the fifteenth century was about to be made clear. Even in the context of armed conflict, Marguerite’s power was far from negligible, but here she could act only by proxy. One chronicle describes how it was “by her urging” that the king—nominally—assembled an army. But as that army met the York-Neville forces in the autumn of 1459, at Blore Heath, Marguerite could only wait for news, a few miles away. She would have to wait to hear, among other things, that Thomas, Lord Stanley, whose forces were promised to her, had in fact held them neutral and outside the fray. Shakespeare’s Clarence in Henry VI, Part 3 mocks “Captain Margaret,” but in fact the inability to lead their own army would be a problem for female rulers through the time of Elizabeth I, in the next century.* Blore Heath was a massive victory for the Yorkist forces: it was after this battle that Marguerite reputedly told a local blacksmith to put the shoes of her horse on backward, to disguise her tracks as she rode away.

  But Marguerite was far from without influence, even in this arena. When the two armies faced off outside Ludlow a couple of weeks later, one source records that the Lancastrian soldiers would fight “for the love they bare to the King, but more for the fear they had of the Queen, whose countenance was so fearful and whose look was so terrible that to all men against whom she took displeasure, her frowning was their undoing and her indignation their death.” On this occasion, the Yorkist forces ultimately backed off from armed conflict with their monarch, and the resultant flight has come to be called the rout of Ludford Bridge.