Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  Arranging this would be no simple matter. True, Marguerite had a son, Edward; Warwick had one unmarried daughter, Anne. But the parents’ long enmity was bound to create problems along the way. The Milanese ambassador to the French court gives a long account of the French king persuading Marguerite to the Warwick marriage and how she had shown herself “very hard and difficult,” keeping the earl on his knees before her as she railed. Another account, The Manner and Guiding of the Earl of Warwick at Angers in July and August 1470, agrees that she was “right dificyle.” Not only, as she exploded, had Warwick “injured her as a queen, but he had dared to defame her reputation as a woman by divers false and malicious slanders.”

  Anne’s own feelings about the plan can only be guessed at. The little we hear of her prospective bridegroom is not attractive. The Milanese envoy reported that, as a child, he talked of nothing but the cutting off of heads. Still, despite the boy’s bloodthirstiness, Hall would describe him as having matured into “a goodly girlish looking and well featured young gentleman,” and in the nature of diplomacy, a high-ranking girl was at least as likely to be married to an enemy as a friend. And of course it was a splendid match—one that might make Anne queen someday, if Henry VI’s throne could but be regained for him, and if she was someone who cared for that. But even in an age when most aristocratic marriages were bargains, few brides (Elizabeth Woodville apart) can have had to face quite such a furious reception from their prospective mothers-in-law.

  The two accounts vary a little over the timing, but The Manner and Guiding claims that Queen Marguerite held out for fifteen days against every argument the king of France could show her. “Some time she said that she saw never honour nor profit for her, nor for her son the Prince. In other [times] she [al]ledged that and she would, she should find a more profitable party, and of more advantage, with the King of England. And indeed, she showed unto the King of France a Letter which she said was sent her out of England the last week, by the which was offered to her son My Lady the Princess”—that is, Elizabeth of York.

  Even once Marguerite had given in, the marriage treaty was packed full of conditions, not least that “from thence forth the said daughter of the Earl of Warwick [Anne] shall be put and remain in the hands and keeping of Queen Margaret,” and also that “the said marriage shall not be perfected to [until] the Earl of Warwick had been with an army over the Sea into England, and that he had recovered the realm of England.” If he failed to do so, Anne was presumably to have been left high and dry. But the Milanese ambassador suggests rather that the marriage also had to be delayed by the need to wait for a papal dispensation, since this couple, like so many others, were distantly related by blood (Clarence’s mother being brother to Anne’s grandfather).

  Warwick wasted no time in attempting to fill at least one of the conditions of the marriage contract. In mid-September 1470, he and Clarence set sail, landing in the West Country, claiming always to be doing so in the name of the captive King Henry and “by the assent of the most noble princess, Margaret, Queen of England,” and her son. King Edward was in the North, trying to put down a rebellion organized by Warwick’s brother-in-law, having moved his pregnant wife and daughters into the Tower (which Elizabeth, as the contemporary Warkworth’s Chronicle says, “well victualled and fortified”) for safety while he was away.

  Soon Marguerite and her son at Amboise, along with the young Anne, heard of a great victory. Warwick’s army had moved south. The mayor of London had tried to raise a defense, but a Lancastrian supporter had thrown open the Southwark jail, and a mob burst out. A London contemporary left a vivid description of Queen Elizabeth releasing the Tower to the mayor’s control, he leading her family to the waterside, she holding a chest of jewels while her daughters dragged bedsheets stuffed with clothing behind them to the boats that would carry them upriver to Westminster Abbey and sanctuary.

  On October 1, the Tower fell to Warwick’s forces. On October 3, though Elizabeth and her daughters could not have known it from their refuge in Westminster, Edward with his brother Richard (and Elizabeth’s brother Anthony Woodville, once the hero of the Smithfield tournament) commandeered a boat to the Low Countries and eventually sought refuge with Edward’s sister Margaret of Burgundy. The Yorkist regime was over—for the moment, anyway.

  _______________

  *Berkhamsted—today an impressive ruin cradled in the surrounding hills, and with a thriving market town at its foot—had been used before as a home for queens dowager, the role Cecily felt was hers, and the venerable building had an impressive history. First built soon after the Conquest, subsequent residents and remodelers had included Thomas Becket and Piers Gaveston. But the last of those remodelings had been some time ago. Cecily would be its last inhabitant, and the fact that it became a ruin in the year after her death hardly suggests a widely desired residence.

  *Henry IV’s dowager queen, Joan of Navarre, in 1419 had been briefly imprisoned on the accusation of it. Eleanor Cobham, Humfrey of Gloucester’s wife (and thus once Jacquetta’s sister-in-law, in the days when she had been Duchess of Bedford), was charged in 1441 by her husband’s enemies and sentenced to imprisonment for life, as well as humiliating public penance.

  10

  “THAT WAS A QUEEN”

  Thyself a queen, for me that was a queen,

  Outlive thy glory, like my wretched self.

  THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD

  THE THIRD, 1.3

  As the king fled the country and his queen cowered in sanctuary, Warwick’s Lancastrian supporters came flooding up to London from Kent. When the earl himself finally entered the city, he did at least calm the rioting that had followed the opening of the Southwark jail. He also released King Henry from his imprisonment, although the fuddled king seemed hardly to care he had once again the throne.

  It may not have mattered to Henry that he was once again king of England, but to the deposed Yorkists, the changeover meant everything. Elizabeth Woodville was (in official parlance) no longer queen, Cecily Neville no long the mother of a king, albeit another of her sons was prominent on the victorious side. Crammed into the mass of low-lying buildings between Westminster Abbey and the river, how much did the four-year-old Elizabeth of York and her younger sisters comprehend? They probably lived in the abbot’s house, where Abbot Mylling certainly received them with kindness and offered occasional luxuries, while a London butcher provided “half a beef and two muttons” every week for the royal family’s nourishment. Nonetheless, the official Yorkist narrative of these months, The History of the Arrival of Edward IV in England, describes Elizabeth Woodville at least as enduring “great trouble, sorrow, and heaviness, which she sustained with all manner patience that belonged to any creature.”

  Meanwhile, in Burgundy, Duchess Margaret, in warm remembrance of her Yorkist roots, sent letters to her fugitive brothers, Edward and Richard, while her husband, the duke, sent funds. She—like, presumably, their mother, Cecily—was concerned above all to heal the rifts in the family. But the appearance of these new exiles was nonetheless something of an embarrassment to a duke still anxious to keep peace with the rapacious French. It wasn’t until Christmastime that the new arrivals were invited to join the Burgundian court, France’s hostile intentions toward Burgundy having at last become unmistakable. Still, Margaret, delighted at being allowed to meet and help her two brothers, was active in raising money for their cause.

  For Margaret Beaufort in England, the news of Warwick’s takeover had been welcome. The Lancastrians were back, supported by her brother-in-law Jasper Tudor, who had sailed with Warwick’s fleet in September, and Henry Tudor could be reclaimed from William Herbert and handed over into his uncle’s custody. By the end of October, Jasper and Henry were in London, and Margaret, reunited with her son, took him to see his restored uncle, Henry VI, who (as Polydore Vergil later told it) prophesied future greatness for the boy. With her son and husband, Henry Stafford, she then traveled to Woking for what sounds very much like a joyous holida
y, before Margaret once again handed her son back to his uncle Jasper, to be trained as a man should be, while she resumed negotiations with Clarence about his inheritance.

  But Henry Tudor’s standing in the contentious ranking of Plantagenet scions had just diminished considerably, for on November 2, 1470, Elizabeth Woodville, still in sanctuary at Westminster, had given birth to a boy, whom she named Edward, for his father. One Lady Scrope was allowed in to help her (or possibly to keep an eye on her), along with professional midwife Marjory Cobbe, on whom Elizabeth placed enough reliance to see that she had, only the year before, been granted ten pounds a year for life. The arrival of a long-awaited son and heir should have been the moment of greatest triumph for Elizabeth, but at the moment no one could know what this boy’s future would be. A prince should have had a cradle canopied in a cloth of gold, an ermine-trimmed blanket, and the grandest of christenings. Instead, with his grandmother Jacquetta and the abbot for godparents, he was baptized in the abbey with scant ceremony. There would indeed have been few funds to pay for anything more. While Henry VI’s resumed government was notably restrained about reclaiming Yorkist lands, they did seize the dower properties of Elizabeth and of Jacquetta.

  Elizabeth’s treacherous brother-in-law Clarence had ridden behind Warwick as he entered London, but as the weeks wore on, he was once again becoming increasingly disaffected. The deal between Warwick and Marguerite had neatly cut him out; with Warwick’s daughter Anne now married to the Lancastrian Prince of Wales (and the Yorkist king having now an infant son and heir in the cradle), it had become a matter of secondary importance that her sister, Isabel, was married to that king’s brother Clarence, once his brother’s heir.

  Curiously, Marguerite—whose return to England would surely have confirmed the authority and permanence of the new regime—was still across the Channel. She and her son, with Warwick’s wife and daughters, had spent the autumn at and around the French court, where the records of Louis’s receiver of finance show moneys paid out for their maintenance, for their silverware, “for their pleasures.” Marguerite’s delay might seem to say something not only about her lack of eagerness to be reunited with her husband, but also about the way she thought, the way she had never gotten in touch with England emotionally. But it may instead have been simply that Louis demanded her (and Anne’s) presence as a guarantee of Warwick’s honesty—as hostages, in the nicest possible way.

  Given the news of Warwick’s success, Anne and Edward of Lancaster were finally married, in Amboise, on December 13. Anne’s mother and sister, at least, were present. It is unclear whether the marriage was immediately consummated, the one way of making it irrevocable, but it seems possible that it was not; several years later, Crowland was still describing Anne as a “maiden.” On the day after the wedding, they set out for Paris and a ceremonial entry into the city.

  It was well after Christmas before Marguerite headed to Rouen, where she expected to find Warwick waiting to escort her across the Channel. But rather than crossing to France to escort her, Warwick had remained in England. He had other fish to fry. When Marguerite finally realized he was not coming and traveled to the coast, the winds had turned against her. It was almost the end of March before the party attempted to set sail, only to be delayed more than another two weeks by those contrary winds.

  The delay was fatal. As Marguerite cooled her heels on the French coast, on March 11, 1471, Edward (with his brother Richard of Gloucester and his brother-in-law Anthony Woodville) had set sail back to England, with a new army. He landed north of the Humber on March 14, winning his welcome into York with the now-traditional announcement that he sought only his father’s inheritance as Duke of York. Working their way southward, his forces set up camp outside the town of Warwick, where they found an opposing Lancastrian army led by Clarence.

  Rather than setting upon each other, however, the two elder York brothers were reconciled. Clarence took a force of more than forty thousand men over to his brother’s side. It was an extraordinary, and dramatic, turn of events. Clarence, who had just helped to drive Edward off the throne and out of England, was now allied with him once again. Marguerite of Anjou (and Anne with her) must have suffered the bitterness of knowing that if only they had arrived earlier, the pulls and fractures within the Lancastrian party, and the support in the country, might have played out very differently. Anne’s sister, Isabel, had crossed the Channel to England earlier to be with her husband, Clarence, and it is tempting to wonder what part she played in his deliberations, the results of which now set her on the opposite side from her father, mother, and sister.

  But Clarence—so the Arrival reports—had been under pressure from his own mother and sisters, with “the high and mighty princess my Lady, their mother; my lady of Exeter [their sister Anne], my lady of Suffolk [their sister Elizabeth] . . . and, most specially, my Lady of Bourgoigne [Burgundy]” mediating between the two “by right covert ways and means.” Other sources too record Margaret’s “great and diligent efforts,” her stream of messengers: Croyland says Clarence had been reconciled to his brother “by the mediation of his sisters, the Duchesses of Burgundy and Exeter,” the former working on the king and the latter on the duke.

  Some suspected a deal had been in negotiation for months, with Margaret of Burgundy as the go-between. When Clarence had been in Calais the previous year, says the continental writer Philippe de Commynes, he had been approached by a mysterious Englishwoman “of few words” who claimed she had come from England to serve the Duchess Isabel and requested a private interview. When they were alone, she produced a letter from Edward offering full forgiveness if he would return to the fold. Clarence gave an ambiguous promise that he would indeed return—sometime, as soon as it was possible—and the lady, “the only contriver of the enterprise,” departed as mysteriously as she had arrived.

  After the battlefield reconciliation, Margaret wrote a vivid description to her mother-in-law: “Clarence with a small company left his people behind him and approached my lord and brother who saw him coming and Lord Clarence threw himself on his knees so that my lord and brother seeing his humility and hearing his words, lifted him up and embraced him several times and gave him his good cheer.”

  Whatever role his female relatives had played in it, Clarence’s defection was a catastrophe for the Earl of Warwick—and, of course, for all those women still tied to the Lancastrian side. Clarence tried to mediate a deal between his brother and his father-in-law, but to no avail. Edward retook London in a bloodless coup, taking care as he neared the city to send what the Arrival called “comfortable messages” to his wife, Elizabeth. Most of the Lancastrians powerful enough to stand against him were heading for the West Country to greet Marguerite when she finally made her way across the Channel, and the attempt to rally London against Edward was led by Sir Thomas Cook, he with whom Jacquetta had quarreled over the tapestry. Henry returned without argument to captivity in the Tower, while Edward moved in procession toward Westminster. His reunion with his family—now the richer by the all-important baby boy, his father’s “most desired treasure”—was too great a propaganda opportunity to be done altogether privately. In the words of a later ballad:

  The King comforted the Queen and the other ladies eke.

  His sweet baby full tenderly he did kiss.

  The young prince he beheld and in his arms did bear.

  Thus his bale turned him to bliss.

  But of course things were not quite that sunny. Fortune’s Wheel could turn yet again. Despite the blow Clarence’s defection had given him, Warwick could never be underestimated, and Marguerite, with a French army, was known to be on the way. Edward, still marching southward from the battlefield, sent word his family should take refuge in his mother’s home of Baynard’s Castle, just west of the City. Clarence and Gloucester joined them for the night: it was only a few days before Easter, but Elizabeth Woodville’s feelings must surely have been less than Christian as she looked at Clarence, the man who had helped
put her through so much.

  Edward was intent on meeting the growing Lancastrian threat head-on. On April 11, he entered London to public applause, but it was to urge his family to the Tower for safety while he rode out again. On Easter Sunday, April 14, his force met Warwick’s at Barnet, just to the north of London, in a fog so dense there were suggestions it must have been raised by witchcraft or, as the chronicler Fabian put it, “incantations.” The fighting was intense and bloody—and among the many casualties was the Earl of Warwick.

  Cecily’s son had now killed her nephew: the Kingmaker had played his last hand in English politics. When Marguerite and her son at long last landed at Weymouth on the evening of April 14, the battle was already decided, although she could not know it. She had reached Cerne Abbey in Dorset before the news arrived—news that, when it did come, caused her to swoon with shock. But she rallied her courage and moved through the West Country, trying to rally support, cheered in Bristol by a reception warm enough to give her fresh courage.

  Nor did those on the other side have it altogether easy. In London, the Lancastrians had not given up all hope of the city. The mayor and aldermen had to send a message to Edward, begging him to come back to the defense “of the Queen, then being in the Tower of London, my Lord Prince, and my Ladies his daughters . . . and of the city,” all in “the greatest jeopardy.” The royal women felt the Tower shake as the Bastard of Falconbridge, a kinsman of Warwick’s, turned his guns on the city, and seven hundred men died under his onslaught.