Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  Warwick and Salisbury fled across the Channel to Calais, where their family was waiting. With them went Edward, Earl of March, the eldest son of York and Cecily. York himself and his second son, Edmund, fled to Ireland. Cecily with her younger children had most likely remained at Ludlow: a comfortable castle fitted out for the York family with the fifteenth-century luxuries of window glass and privacy, but now no sanctuary. Several sources record that she and her two youngest sons were taken prisoner there, but in an age that prided itself on chivalry, it was never likely that any personal, physical reprisal would be taken against her, a woman (and indeed there would be widespread disapproval when anyone did break the unspoken rules that meant a lady, whatever her husband had done, might still be assured not only of her personal safety, but perhaps even of control of some of the family’s property). One chronicle does say that while the town of Ludlow was robbed to the bare walls, “the noble Duchess of York was entreated and [de]spoiled,” but the absence of any other sign of outrage suggests that the damage was only to her goods.

  When a Parliament held at Coventry—packed with Marguerite’s supporters and known as the “Parliament of Devils”—attainted the Yorkist lords, Cecily went to the city on December 6 and submitted herself to royal mercy. Gregory’s Chronicle recorded that “the Duchess of York came unto King Harry and submitted her unto his grace, and she prayed for her husband that he might come to his answer to be received unto his grace; and the king full humbly granted her grace, and to all hers that would come with her.” Attainder meant not only that the men were convicted of treason, but also that their lands were now the property of the Crown. Cecily, however, was given a grant of a thousand marks per annum—income derived from some of those confiscated lands—“for the relief of her and her infants who had not offended against the king,” as the official wording put it, carefully. Her sister-in-law, the Countess of Salisbury, was personally attainted; Cecily was not. She was placed in custody, but the custodian was her own sister, Anne, the Duchess of Buckingham, Margaret Beaufort’s mother-in-law, whose husband had declared for the queen’s side and who seems to have kept her own natal Lancastrian sympathies. It is speculated that the comparative leniency with which Cecily was treated was the result of her friendship with Queen Marguerite—though the chronicles also report that “she was kept full straight with many a rebuke” from her sister—and by January she was free to move southward again. All the same, it was a low moment for Cecily.

  No wonder the German artist Albrecht Dürer drew Fortune frequently, in many different guises, blind and pregnant, wounded or weaponed. In future years, when Cecily’s family had left this low point long behind them, the poet John Skelton would lament Cecily’s son Edward IV as Fortune’s fool:

  She took me by the hand and led me a dance,

  And with her sugared lips on me she smiled,

  But, what from her dissembled countenance,

  I could not beware till I was beguiled . . .

  At this moment, however, the future prominence of Cecily’s son had never looked more unlikely.

  _______________

  *Christine de Pizan wrote that a baroness should know the laws of arms and the tactics necessary to defend her castle against attack; her queen, however, was expected to take a more passive role. Even at the Paston level, a man could be found sending his wife to preserve their claim to the house and she ordering crossbows. But Margaret Paston was eventually to find that “I cannot well guide nor rule soldiers,” who did not heed her as they would a man.

  6

  “MIGHTINESS MEETS MISERY”

  then, in a moment, see

  How soon this mightiness meets misery

  THE LIFE OF KING HENRY

  THE EIGHTH, PROLOGUE

  Even by the standards of these tumultuous years, the ups and downs of these few months were extraordinary. Cecily had reached what must surely have felt like her nadir at the end of 1459, but by the following summer, 1460, her Yorkist menfolk were back with a fresh army.

  The Earl of Warwick, and Cecily’s son Edward, had returned from Calais, and at Northampton, in July, their forces again met those of the king and queen. This time the victorious Yorkists were able to seize the person of Henry VI and bring him back to London as their puppet or prisoner, all the while proclaiming their loyalty.

  The London chronicler Gregory described Marguerite’s flight after Henry’s capture: “The queen, hearing this, voided unto Wales but . . . a servant of her own . . . spoiled her and robbed her, and put her so in doubt of her life and son’s life also.” The servant was one John Cleger, but as he was rifling through her luggage, the queen and her son managed to escape. “And then she come to the castle of Harlech in Wales,” wrote Gregory, “and she had many great gifts and [was] greatly comforted, for she had need thereof.” The queen had with her only four companions, the chronicler reports in horror (a great lady’s household might be a hundred and fifty; the Duke of Clarence would regularly take almost two hundred people with him from house to house), and she was forced most often to ride pillion behind a fourteen-year-old boy.

  Marguerite was not the only woman whose fortunes had changed overnight. Everything was changing, once again, for Cecily, too. In this latest battle, her brother-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham, was among the casualties; the widowed Anne had only recently been rebuking Cecily for being on the wrong side of the fight, an irony that could not have been far from her mind now. While her nephew, Warwick, returned to Calais in triumph to fetch his family home, Cecily and her younger children moved to London, to await word from her husband. As Queen Marguerite fled westward, York sent for Cecily (traveling in a chair of blue velvet “and four pair coursers therein,” as Gregory described her) to come and meet him in Hereford, so as to share his triumphal progress, heralded by trumpeters and displaying the royal arms, back into London.

  It surely says something about their relationship that York wanted Cecily by his side, riding in victory through the green summer country. But in fact the very flamboyance of the entry “proud Cis” shared with her husband may have worked against them. Citizens and nobles alike were pleased enough to welcome York: he had during his previous stints as protector proven himself a steady hand, to keep anarchy at bay. But when it looked as though York would claim the throne itself, it was clear they were no more ready to accept this usurpation than they had been Marguerite’s proxy sovereignty. One monastic chronicler, the abbot of St. Albans, John Whethamsted, has a long and vivid description of the misstep into which York’s “exaltation of mood” led him, right down to a record of the distribution of the major players around Westminster palace. York strode to the parliamentary chamber and laid his hand upon the throne as if to claim it. He waited for the applause that, however, failed to come, and then proceeded to the principal chamber of the palace, smashing the locks to gain his entry.

  But people of all “estates and ranks, age, sex, order and condition” had, Whethamsted says, begun to murmur against York’s presumption. When York continued to press his own claim to the throne, even his friends were horrified. By the end of October 1460, the matter had gone to Parliament, and under the auspices of the Lords a deal was hammered out. Henry would keep the throne for his lifetime but would be succeeded not by his son, but by York and York’s sons—an idea presumably made more plausible by that long whispering campaign suggesting Marguerite’s infidelity. Such a prospect, with its huge advancement for her children, must have been acceptable to Cecily. But of course Marguerite, whose own young son had been disinherited, was never going to accept it quietly.

  Toward the end of the year, she took a ship northward from Wales. Marguerite’s plan was to appeal for help from the Scots—over whom, ironically, another woman, Mary of Guelders, was commencing her rule as regent on behalf of her eight-year-old son, James, her husband having recently been killed by an exploding cannon while besieging Yorkist sympathizers at Roxburgh. Mary sent an envoy to escort Marguerite and her young son to Dumfries and Lincl
uden Abbey, where they were royally entertained while Mary herself came down to meet them. The two queens spent twelve days together at the abbey, and Mary promised military aid, offering the hospitality of the Scottish royal palaces while it was assembled. Moving into England with a foreign army would do little to increase her popularity, but Marguerite was in no mood to worry.

  With Henry’s captivity, she had now become the undisputed leader of the Lancastrian party: stripped of much she had once enjoyed, but liberated for the first time to act openly on her own initiative. The Yorkist lords, recognizing her importance, tried—according to Gregory’s Chronicle—to lure Marguerite south to London with faked messages from her husband, “for she was more wittier than the king.”

  As the Duke of York moved north to meet the impending Lancastrian threat, Marguerite’s name was being invoked by friends and enemies alike—even before she was ready to leave Scotland. York, inside his own Sandal Castle, was advised (says the Tudor writer Hall, whose grandfather had been the adviser concerned) not to sally out, but answered it would be a dishonor to do so “for dread of a scolding woman, whose only weapons are her tongue and her nails.” The Lancastrian herald, to provoke York into taking a dangerous offensive, sneered that he should allow himself “to be tamely braved by a woman.”

  York should have heeded all the warnings. Now, once again, the time was coming when it would be Cecily’s turn to drink a bitter cup. No wonder she, like Margaret Beaufort, would remember the image of Fortune’s Wheel, and would, perhaps ironically, bequeath a bed decorated with that image to the Tudor dynasty. An anonymous poem neatly captures the vicissitudes with which she must by now have been familiar:

  I have seen fall to men of high nobleness—

  First wealth, and then again distress,

  Now up, now down, as fortune turneth her wheel—

  On December 30, the royal forces (under the command of the third Duke of Somerset, Margaret Beaufort’s cousin, who shared his father’s and uncle’s strong Lancastrian loyalty) met the Yorkists at the battle of Wakefield and were soundly defeated. Casualties of the rout included York himself, pulled from his horse in the thick of the fray, and his seventeen-year-old son, Edmund, with whose death Shakespeare would make such play. Salisbury (whose son had also died) was killed the next day. Their heads were set on spikes on the gates of York, the duke’s capped with a paper crown. Tudor chroniclers like Hall and Holinshed, followed by Shakespeare, had the heads presented to a savagely vengeful Marguerite. But in fact Marguerite left Scotland only after news of the victory, traveling southward in an outfit of black and silver lent to her by the Scottish queen, Mary.

  Cecily had lost a husband, a son, a brother, and a nephew. The news must have reached her and her three youngest children, in London and probably at Baynard’s Castle, with the taste of the Christmas feasts still in their mouths. A house like Baynard’s Castle with its gardens and terraces—and its great hall and its courtyards capable of holding the four hundred armed men the duke had once brought with him from Ireland—must have seemed a place of refuge in a treacherously shifting world. But the Duke of York’s death brought to an end a long and in many ways happy union. It had also narrowly deprived Cecily of her chance of being queen, and she would not forget it easily.

  Marguerite’s party were once more in the ascendant. As the queen came south with her forces, sometime in January or early February 1461, she sent letters—writing once on her own behalf, and once in the name of her young son—to the authorities of London, demanding the City’s loyalty. The letter nominally from the seven-year-old prince presents him as the active avenger, heading his own army. Even Marguerite’s own letter, forcefully written though it is, can only suggest that she is acting in tandem with her young son, “praying you, on our most hearty and desirous wise, that [above] all earthly things you will diligently intend [attend] to the surety of my lord’s royal person in the mean time; so that through malice of his said enemy he be no more troubled, vexed, or jeoparded. And, by so doing, we shall be unto you such a lady as of reason you shall largely be content.”

  As her army swept ever southward, her troops pillaged the land and she did nothing to halt them, aware that she was unable to offer the alternative of pay. The pillaging did much to sour her subsequent reputation, besides providing fuel for Yorkist propaganda that implicitly linked this catastrophic “misrule” with the parallel reversal of right order represented by a woman’s leadership.

  But despite their marauding, the Lancastrian troops seemed unstoppable with the queen at their head. After the second battle of St. Albans, on February 17, 1461, the reports are full of mentions of the queen or the queen’s party. One source, the Milanese Prospero di Camulio, seems even to suggest that this one time she was in the thick of the fray: “The earl of Warwick decided to quit the field, and . . . pushed through right into Albano [St. Albans], where the queen was with 30,000 men.” The chronicler Gregory wrote that in the midst of the battle, “King Harry went to his queen and forsook all his lords, and trust[ed] better to her party than to his own.” One anecdotal report of a speech she made to her men is as heroic in its own way as Elizabeth I’s at Tilbury: “I have often broken [the English] battle line. I have mowed down ranks far more stubborn than theirs are now. You who once followed a peasant girl [Joan of Arc] now follow a queen. . . . I will either conquer or be conquered with you.”

  Marguerite had by now experienced far more warfare than most ladies of her time. She would have known the tension beforehand, mounting to a fever pitch; the fear that each step of her horse’s hoof could bring it down on the sharp point of a hidden caltrop, before men rushed out from ambush in the bushes to claim her as their prey; the roads, afterward, crammed with the bodies of horses and with bleeding, dying men who lacked even the strength to crawl away.

  King Henry had been brought under guard to the second battle of St. Albans by Warwick, and after the battle he was found seated under an oak tree. Marguerite was reunited with her husband, and together they headed for the capital. As the couple halted outside London, the City officials requested that a delegation of trusted ladies should act as go-betweens, interceding with Marguerite “for to be benevolent and owe goodwill to the city,” which had until recently been host to the pretender York.* The ladies were Ismanie, Lady Scales, who had been among those escorting Marguerite from France and who had remained in her household; the widowed Duchess of Buckingham (Cecily of York’s sister and Margaret Beaufort’s mother-in-law, Anne, whose husband had been killed the previous summer fighting in the Lancastrian cause); and Jacquetta, dowager Duchess of Bedford. Born a scion of the princely house of Luxembourg, married in her youth to Henry VI’s uncle John, Jacquetta had been widowed in 1435 at the age of just nineteen, and “minding also to marry rather for pleasure than for honour, without council of her friends,” had promptly married “a lusty knight, Sir Richard Woodville.” Originally sent to France as one of the party escorting Marguerite to England, Jacquetta had remained close to the queen; indeed, her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, may have been one of Marguerite’s ladies. Now not only was Jacquetta’s own husband with the queen’s force, but so too, until recently, had been her daughter’s husband and father to her two young sons, John Grey. John Grey had died at the second battle of St. Albans, leaving Elizabeth Woodville a widow—a development that would soon propel her into national history.

  A letter reported that the delegation returned to London on Friday, February 20, with news 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 the evildoers.” But the message was ambiguous enough that there was still the danger of panic in the streets, and the ladies were sent out again on Sunday to negotiate that the Lancastrian leaders might enter the City without the main body of their army. The queen agreed.

  Ironically, Marguerite’s decision to send only a small symbolic force into London, and her subsequent withdraw
al back to Dunstable with her husband and the bulk of her forces, would prove to be arguably the mistake of her life. The wheel was about to turn yet again. In another of the huge overturns of fortune that had already marked this young war, the upset was not heralded in any way. In the weeks after the battle of Wakefield, Cecily Neville had been so afraid as to send her two younger sons, George and Richard, abroad, to the safety of Burgundy. Yet almost as she did so, her eldest son, Edward, and her nephew, the Earl of Warwick, with their armies, were preparing to approach London from the west. They encountered no opposition due to Marguerite’s northerly withdrawal, and on February 27 they were welcomed into the City, and Edward went to his mother’s house of Baynard’s Castle.

  This time, there was no talk of loyalty to King Henry, or of wishing only to rid him of his evil counselors. On Sunday, March 1, the Bishop of Exeter, Warwick’s brother and, like him, cousin to Edward, asked the eager Londoners whether they felt that Henry deserved to rule, “whereunto,” as the Great Chronicle of London reported, “the people cried hugely and said Nay. And after it was asked of them whether they would have the Earl of March [Edward] for their king and they cried with one voice, Yea, Yea.”