Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  According to at least one report—admittedly made to Elizabeth’s brother—the marriage was, broadly speaking, acceptable in the country: Marguerite, and the turmoil for which she was blamed, had put the people off foreign royalty. But a newsletter from Bruges reported differently, that the “greater part of the lords and the people in general seem very much dissatisfied.” In court circles, the marriage was certainly unwelcome. Woodville ascendancy was bound to upset both actual royal family and the great magnate Warwick—more mouths to feed at the royal trough, never mind any differing views on policy. This was all the more true, of course, since those who had shed blood for York had now to see a household of Lancastrians exalted so high.

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  *If we want a suggestion of what Cecily might have hoped her relation to Edward would be, we could look to the letter Alice Chaucer’s husband, Suffolk, had left for his son: “I charge you, my dear son, always, as ye be bounden by the commandment of god to do, to love, to worship your lady and mother, and also that ye obey always her commandments, and to believe her counsels and advices in all your works.”

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  “FORTUNE’S PAGEANT”

  And, being a woman, I will not be slack

  To play my part in Fortune’s pageant

  HENRY VI, PART 2, 1.2

  While discord was sprouting within the young Yorkist regime, Edward had another, more pressing, cause for concern. The previous queen, the deposed Marguerite, had long since ceased nursing her wounds and was on the move once again. Although Henry had never been the most capable of leaders at even the best of times, Marguerite had proven herself an active queen. It was a role she had no intention of walking away from now.

  In April 1462, before most people in England had even heard the name Elizabeth Woodville, Marguerite had made her way from Scotland to France. A register of the city of Rouen, in July, describes her as being received “with much honour, by the gentlemen of the King’s suite,” and lodging in the hotel of the Golden Lion, belonging to a lawyer of the city. She had since the year before been using her old admirer Pierre de Brézé to negotiate a loan and a fleet with which to seize the Channel Islands and make a bridgehead from France to England. The idea of inviting their traditional enemies, the French, to launch an armed invasion would have appalled Marguerite’s English subjects. “If the Queen’s intentions were discovered, her friends would unite with her enemies to kill her,” de Brézé said. Foreseeing “good winnings,” the French king, Louis (possibly under pressure from his mother, Marguerite’s aunt), did eventually give her aid, with Marguerite, in another gesture that would have horrified most Englishmen and -women, promising to cede him Calais in return. In the autumn of 1462, she had sailed back to Scotland, bringing forty ships and eight hundred French soldiers provided by the French king and under de Brézé’s command. Collecting some Scots led by Somerset (and nominally by the deposed king Henry VI), she pushed across the border into northern England, where she made “open war,” as the Great Chronicle of London puts it.

  Her campaign was unsuccessful. When the Yorkist guns on England’s northern coast were trained upon her, she was forced to flee in a small sailing ship, a carvel. But the Great Chronicle relates how, as a violent storm came up, she was compelled to abandon even that attempt to find safety and land again at Berwick, leaving the carvel, with all her goods on board, to go down at sea. Edward himself rode north to confront her. The next spring, as Gregory’s Chronicle describes it, she was still fighting on in the North.

  In the summer of 1463, there came one of the few episodes from the Cousins’ War in which the conflicts and their heroines have been converted into story. As Marguerite and her party were fleeing back toward Bamburgh, the stronghold on the Northumberland coast, she and her son were separated from their followers. Suddenly, a gang of robbers leaped out of the bushes, seized the baggage, tore the very jewels from around her neck, and dragged her before their leader. He had drawn his sword to cut her throat when she threw herself on her knees and implored him not to disfigure her body past recognition, for, as she said, “I am the daughter and wife of a king, and was in past times recognized by yourselves as your queen.” In the best tradition of monster-taming myth, the man (“Black Jack”) in turn fell on his knees before her and led her and her son to a secret cave in Deepden Woods, where Marguerite sheltered until de Brézé found her.

  The Duke of Burgundy’s official “historiographer,” Georges Chastellain, had the opportunity of hearing the gist of the tale from Marguerite herself only a few months later—but Chastellain was a poet and rhetorician as much as a chronicler, and for him the message may have been more important than the factual reality. Less romantic if perhaps also exaggerated is the fact that, as Chastellain tells it, Marguerite was now so poor she had to borrow a groat from a Scottish archer to make an offering on Saint Margaret’s feast day. So poor was she that for five days, she and her husband and son were forced to subsist on a single day’s ration of bread and “one herring between the three.”

  There is, of course, an air of unreality about Chastellain’s story, but there is no doubt about what happened next: Marguerite was forced to flee back to the Continent, leaving her husband behind to roam as a fugitive in the North, hiding in friendly houses. Even then, Marguerite did not give up so easily, attempting, over the next few years, to rally support from the rulers of Brittany, Burgundy, Germany, and Portugal, as well as France. Chastellain describes not only her forcible pleading with the European monarchs but also the “wonder” caused by her arrival in Burgundy, since she had once been the duke’s mortal enemy. “Wherefore were heard divers murmurs against her in many mouths, and many savage comments on the nature of her misfortune.”

  Marguerite, Chastellain says, arrived in Burgundy

  poor and alone, destitute of goods and all desolate; [she] had neither credence, nor money, nor goods, nor jewels to pledge. [She] had her son, no royal robes, nor estate; and her person without adornment befitting a queen. Her body was clad in one single robe, with no change of clothing. [She] had no more than seven women for her retinue, and whose apparel was like that of their mistress, formerly one of the most splendid women of the world and now one of the poorest; and finally she had no other provision nor even bread to eat, except from the purse of her knight. . . . It was a thing piteous to see, truly, this high princess so cast down and laid low in such great danger, dying of hunger and hardship.

  For all his sympathy, it is hard not to feel that the Burgundian chronicler was relishing the drama of her “lowliness and abasement” as he describes how the English in Calais were trying to capture Marguerite, how she had been forced to travel in a country cart “covered over with canvas and harnessed with four mares like a poor woman going unknown.”* The Burgundian duke tried to dodge her for a time, but Marguerite sent word that “were my cousin of Burgundy to go to the end of the world I would follow him.” He gave way and after meeting her did send her both financial aid and his sister the Duchess of Bourbon as a companion. The two women struck up an eager friendship, with Marguerite recounting adventures that, she said, outdid any in story. The duchess agreed that if a book were to be written on the troubles of royal ladies, Marguerite’s would be acknowledged as the most shocking of catastrophes.

  Marguerite was finally forced to retreat to her father’s land at St. Michel-sur-Bar, living on an inadequate pension and paying visits to her European relatives. Letters from her officers detail the extreme shortage of ready money—hardly enough coins to pay the messenger—“but yet the Queen sustaineth us in meat and drink, so as we be not in extreme necessity.” Early in 1465 she tried again to get help from King Louis, warning that if he refused her, “she will take the best course she can.” The king’s response was to marvel to his court: “Look how proudly she writes . . . ”

  But if Marguerite still had all her pride, it—and her claim to any power in England—would soon suffer a further blow. In July 1465, just months after Elizabeth Woodville’s
elaborate coronation ceremony in London, the fugitive Henry VI was finally taken captive, the news reaching Edward in Canterbury some five days later. After a humiliating journey south, with his legs tied to his horse’s stirrups and a straw hat on his head, Henry was placed in comparatively lenient imprisonment in the Tower, welcome to receive visitors, albeit Lancastrian chroniclers complained he was not kept as cleanly as a king should be. He would remain in captivity for the next five years while—with England settling into Edward’s rule and Elizabeth’s queenship—Marguerite, on the Continent, was a threat that refused to go away.

  Abroad, Marguerite’s own mood must have been made the more desperate by news that in England, things were going well, especially when she learned it was the daughter of her old friend Jacquetta who had now turned sides and supplanted her as queen, with Jacquetta’s active connivance. In 1465 Elizabeth was asked to become patroness of the college (now Queens’ College) Marguerite herself had founded in Cambridge, “to laud and honour of sex feminine.” Patronage was an established function of queenship; royally born or not, Elizabeth Woodville was settling into her new role.

  As if to add to Marguerite’s miseries, in the summer of 1465, hard on the heels of her coronation, came evidence that Queen Elizabeth was pregnant. February 1466 saw the birth at Westminster of the couple’s first child, Elizabeth of York. The physician and astrologer Master Dominic, who would have been canvassed for his predictions, had been convinced this would be a prince, says the chronicler Fabian; when it turned out, instead, to be a lady princess, the Archbishop of York was substituted for that of Canterbury at the christening. But there was no other diminution of ceremony. A visitor from Bohemia, one Gabriel Tetzel, who came in the train of the Lord of Rozmital, left an account of the queen’s churching that followed some forty days after the birth.

  Tetzel was already convinced that this was “the most splendid court that one can find in all Christendom” when he saw the procession that headed to Westminster Abbey—forty-two singers, twenty-four heralds, sixty lords before the queen, and sixty-two ladies after. The banquet that followed—or, rather, banquets, since the king and queen kept their separate state—survives as the most striking example of court etiquette. Some have taken it as an example of the upstart Elizabeth Woodville’s personal grandiosity, but in fact it may have been no more than the reverence the English were expected to pay to majesty.

  Leo von Rozmital and his train were carefully seated (King Edward would have wanted reports of this to spread) in an alcove of “a particularly splendid and decorated hall” where Elizabeth sat alone at a table on a costly golden chair, with her own mother and the king’s sister standing below her. If the queen talked with either of them, so Tetzel reported, they had to kneel down until, by taking a drink of water, she gave them the signal to rise. It was even worse for her ladies: they had to remain on their knees for the whole time that the queen was eating—no light undertaking, since the meal lasted three silent hours.

  Edward’s sister Elizabeth took the new queen’s right: his youngest sister, Margaret, was on her left. (No accounts mention the king’s eldest sister, Anne, and his mother, Cecily, presumably chose to absent herself.) After the banquet came the dancing: Tetzel writes that Margaret danced with two dukes “in stately dances, and made impressive courtesies to the queen such as I have never seen elsewhere; nor have I witnessed such outstandingly beautiful maidens.”

  Edward’s charm offensive, designed to increase his reputation around the European courts, had clearly worked spectacularly well, and his queen was proving adept, new to the task though she might be. She was helping Edward to shore up his position in other ways as well. Elizabeth of York’s birth in February 1466 was followed quickly by the delivery of a second daughter, Mary, in August 1467. The royal family was growing fast—although as yet there were no direct male heirs to inherit the throne in the case of Edward’s death.

  Elizabeth Woodville was also busy in other ways. The only surviving accounts for her date from 1466–1467, and though it is tempting to concentrate on the colorful details (£14 for sable furs, £18 7s 6d for medicines), they make it clear that to be a queen was not only to be a diplomatic pawn, a breeding machine, or a decorative accessory. It was to be the head of an important household, the mistress of wide estates, and an employer of laborers, craftsmen, and professionals in many different capacities.

  Elizabeth’s income during this period was £4,541 (as opposed to the extravagant Marguerite of Anjou’s £7,563, fourteen years before), but she ended the year in profit, unlike Marguerite, employing fewer servants—seven maids to Marguerite’s ten—and paying more cautiously. (Marguerite had paid one of her principal ladies in waiting, Barbalina, 40 marks a year. Elizabeth paid her principal ladies 20.) Her husband did not charge her, as Marguerite’s had done, for the time her household spent living with his—some recompense for the fact that he could not afford to grant her dower lands on the scale her predecessor had enjoyed. And Elizabeth was sharp when she needed to be in the pursuance of the rights on which much of her income depended: an undated letter to Sir William Stonor chastises him for the fact that he had taken it upon himself “to make masteries within our forest and chace of Barnwood and Exhill, and there, in contempt of us, uncourteously to hunt and slay our deer within the same, to our great marvel and displeasure.”

  Elizabeth did not hesitate to exercise influence, sometimes using a specifically female network to do so. In 1468 instructions of the king’s, concerning the Pastons’ affairs, were echoed by letters of the queen to the Duchesses of Norfolk and Suffolk; she had already written more directly to the Earl of Oxford on the same point. On the other, it begs the question of when and how the use of that influence might be seen as inappropriate by her contemporaries.

  A queen was allowed and even expected to intercede on behalf of those to whom she owed protection. It was part of the symbiotic relationship the phrase “good ladyship” implied. But Elizabeth’s advancement of her family over the years did leave both herself and her husband vulnerable to attack. These very years saw a cementing of Woodville alliances, in a way that seemed threatening to other members of the nobility—not least to Edward’s brother Clarence, who might otherwise himself have hoped to enjoy greater benefits from his brother’s regime. Five Woodville brothers and five sisters married into the nobility, the men given influential posts; Elizabeth Woodville’s two sons by her first marriage benefited handsomely from their mother’s new position as well. The Milanese envoy’s later report that since her coronation, Elizabeth “had always exerted herself to aggrandise her relations . . . they had the entire government of the realm” might have been based on her enemy Warwick’s propaganda, but it did reflect a popular and influential perception. When Warwick turned later against Edward, proclaiming him guilty of choosing a life of “pastime, pleasure, and dalliance” among base companions (“men descended of low blood and base degree”), he was using the Woodville connection as a stick with which to beat Edward, as well as invoking the trope of scapegoats—“evil counselors”—that the would-be king-makers of these years had so frequently invoked.

  Up to a point, Elizabeth had just been doing what anyone would have done. In many ways, Warwick and his associates had been just the same, and there is a case for suggesting that Edward had consciously elevated the Woodvilles to balance the Warwick affinity, constructing an alternative power base—one dependent on him, rather than on his mentor, Warwick, and one he could control. Elizabeth’s family, after all, had now become his. The Woodville rise had been, however, both flamboyant and somewhat roughshod—in 1466 Elizabeth’s sister Katherine, for example, was married to the youthful Duke of Buckingham, who in later years was said to have resented a bride he felt beneath him. One of her brothers, John, himself no more than twenty, had attracted widespread disapproval by making a marriage, purely for money, with the Duchess of Norfolk, well past her sixtieth birthday.*

  The Woodvilles’ elevation was becoming the stuff of bitter par
ody, even making its way into the royal court. The king’s fool promenaded through the court one day, dressed for passing through water. When the king asked why, he punned that he’d had difficulty passing through many parts of the realm because the “Rivers”—the recently bestowed title of the queen’s father, the Earl Rivers—were running so high.

  More trouble arose in the late 1460s because of the prominent part the Woodvilles were said to have played in arranging the marriage between Charles, Duke of Burgundy, and Edward’s twenty-year-old sister, Margaret, who since the queen’s arrival had been living at court as one of her ladies. Indeed, Crowland says that the enmity between the Woodvilles and Warwick really began when the latter heard that they (“in conformity with the King’s wishes”) were promoting the Burgundian match, instead of the marriage he himself had been urging, with one of several possible candidates in France. The Woodvilles were probably only carrying out Edward’s wishes. Nonetheless, the pageantry notably associated with the marriage was a field in which the Woodvilles (with the Continental inheritance they had from their mother, Jacquetta) could shine.

  The marriage of Charles and Margaret was bookended by legendary tournaments, both of which showed just how far the Woodvilles had climbed. At Smithfield in London in June 1467, Elizabeth Woodville’s brother Anthony—his train of horses variously decked out in white cloth of gold; in damasks of purple, green, and tawny; blue and crimson velvet; and crimson cloth trimmed with sables—fought the “Bastard of Burgundy,” the half brother of Duke Charles, in a ritual battle carefully brought to an end by the king before the knights could do real damage to each other, or to Edward’s diplomacy. The Woodvilles had been all over this fantastical adventure, first mooted soon after the coronation. Anthony Woodville made a chivalric tale of how the queen’s ladies pounced on him (while he was speaking to his sister on his knees, “my bonnet off my head, according to my duty”) and tied a jeweled band to his leg, with a letter bidding him to attend the tournament. The emphasis on courtly parade in the reign of Edward IV deliberately evoked his inheritance from Edward III, and thus provided a king who had seized his crown with an aura of legitimacy. *