Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  The reburial of Richard, Duke of York, at Fotheringhay was meant in part to fulfill filial piety, but also—and more important—to show that the York dynasty he had spawned was here to stay. It began with the procession south, a public ten-day parade that would convey Richard’s body from its initial grave in northern England to its final resting place in the church attached to the Midlands castle of Fotheringhay. The season was high summer, and the trailing black draperies must have turned brown with dust, as the days on the road went by—brush them at night though the servants may. In July the country people would be out in the fields to see the procession pass by, and every trade guild from every town could send their own little train of riders and banners to pay their respects, proudly carrying with them their crosses, their holy water, and their holy relics, without too much fear rain would spoil the local officials’ best clothes or the glitter of the gold embroidery.

  Of course, the noblemen escorting the bodies were going to sweat in their black cloaks—especially the officers of arms with their bright tabards over the mourning clothes. The black hoods were pulled forward over each face, and underneath the heavy folds each forehead must have been streaming, but no matter, these were (as Hamlet, more than a century later, would put it) but the trappings and the suits of woe. If the black clothes, and the black velvet stretched on hoops over the vehicle that bore the coffins, stood out like a stab of darkness against the blue and gold of the July fields, well, that was the point, surely.

  Real, painful, grief must have been the one thing in short supply. It was, after all, more than fifteen years since the dead men—Richard, Duke of York, and his son Edmund—had perished at the battle of Wakefield and been buried there in the North with the scant ceremony accorded to those on the losing side of any war. It was high time that the king’s father—once so shamefully mocked—should be reburied in an appropriately splendid tomb. A few sweaty foreheads, even if they were noble ones, a few horses chafing under the black trappings that swept the ground, were a small price to pay for such a conscious display of power and permanence.

  It had been on or shortly before Sunday, July 21, that the bodies of the Yorkist duke and his son had been exhumed from the place where they had been buried—in the Priory of St. John the Evangelist near Pontefract Castle, probably. After the Dirige had been sung, the cortege had set out, with the correct order of precedence strictly observed and the candles flickering wanly in the bright light of day. Central to the ceremonials was a life-size effigy of the duke, an honor normally permitted only to kings, queens, and bishops—but then, a point was being made. A funeral was an important ceremony in the legitimization of monarchy. The effigy used in a king’s funeral represented the public, symbolic body of the monarch, still present and active, even while the mortal body of the current incumbent might die. This duke’s effigy was clad in dark blue, the color of a king’s mourning, and an angel held a crown over his head in the same assumption of royal dignity that led his widow, Cecily, to call herself “queen by right.”

  As chief mourner, Richard, Duke of Gloucester, rode directly behind the coffins. His habitual residence in the North made him the natural choice to escort his father’s body southward. Behind him rode the nobles and officers, then four hundred poor men on foot, each carrying a taper. The choir of the Chapel Royal was there, to sing at each church where the body rested overnight along the way. They traveled about thirteen miles a day, from Pontefract to Doncaster, Blyth to Tuxford, Newark on Trent, then Grantham, then the long leg to Stamford, and on to their final destination of Fotheringhay.

  The church of Fotheringhay still stands, startling across the meadows. A three-story tower and belfry—probably odder, if less impressive, today than it used to be, since the chancel and cloisters were destroyed after the Reformation. The York tombs have been demolished and different ones rebuilt: only the greens and blues and gold of the restored pulpit originally commissioned by Edward IV give a hint of what the church’s robust color must once have been, when the cloister alone glowed with the jeweled light of almost ninety stained-glass windows.

  The castle that once stood near the church was built as a defensible structure, surrounded by a double moat: one of the country’s finest, with a newer manor house as well as the ancient keep, and all the usual complexes of butteries and breweries, stables and chapels. Today only a grassy mound remains, and even the surrounding water, as shown in the old illustrations, has dwindled to a small river. But nothing can destroy the grandeur of the setting, looking south over the once great River Nene, surrounded by the hunting forest of Rockingham. Besides the castle complex, the church, and the surrounding market town, there was a collegiate establishment covering more than two and a half acres, large enough to boast twelve fellows or chaplains—a center of learning and piety. In 1476 Fotheringhay had only recently been relinquished by Edward IV’s mother, Cecily, but whether or not she had willingly exchanged it for Berkhampsted, she would have approved Edward’s intention for Fotheringhay—to make it into a mausoleum for the York family.*

  King Edward, as described in a French text, written by Chestre le herault (the Chester herald), met his father’s body at the entrance to the churchyard and “very humbly did his obeisance to the said body and laid his hand on the body and kissed it, weeping.” With the corpse carried into the choir of the church and placed inside the hearse, the king “retired to his closet” while “Placebo” and “Dirige” began. “And at the moment of the Magnificat the king had his chamberlain offer to the body seven pieces of cloth of gold and each piece was five yards long, and the queen had five yards offered by her chamberlain and they were laid in the shape of a cross on the said body.” It is the first time any woman has been mentioned—even acting by proxy and offering through her chamberlain—in the course of the ceremony.

  That was on Monday, July 29, and that night the body would have rested in a blaze of candles, though it was in fact some years too late for them to light the path for the departing soul. On Tuesday, three high masses were sung and more cloth of gold offered on behalf of the king, the queen, and the dead man’s younger sons. A horse, a courser, was led to the church door; as part of the traditional offering of the dead man’s knightly trappings, his coat of arms, shield, sword, and helmet were each brought in by different noblemen.

  Next, the royal family came to pay their respects, the queen “dressed all in blue without a high headdress, and there she made a great obeisance and reverence to the said body, and next two of the king’s daughters came to offer in the same way.” The royal daughters are not named but would surely have been the eldest—ten-year-old Elizabeth of York (so recently betrothed to the French Dauphin) and Mary. That the queen, the former Elizabeth Woodville, came without a hennin—the tall pointed cone from which floated a flattering veil, or the veiled, backward-pointing “butterfly” headdress—was presumably a conventional token of grief.

  There is a second French text, surviving in various sixteenth-century versions, that also gives an account of the reburial at Fotheringhay. It places a fourth woman at the requiem mass: “The king offered for the said prince his father and the queen and her two daughters and the countess of Richmond offered next.” The “second French account” survives as a medley of late-fifteenth- and sixteenth-century documents, and it is always possible that a later hand added the name of Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond—later, when her son, Henry, was on the throne, when she had become “My Lady the King’s Mother,” when her presence at any gathering would have become worth recording (and tactful to do so). This could account for the fact that she is the only woman, other than the queen and her two daughters, mentioned specifically in the document. But the blandly undescriptive words do show just how well Margaret Beaufort was doing in trying to placate the ruling Yorkist family.

  And no one could fault this as a resplendent celebration of the Yorkist dynasty. The Chester herald describes the blend of liberality and charity—a penny given to everyone who came to mass and
twopence to each pregnant woman. The accounts of John Eltrington, treasurer of the royal household, show a formidable provision of food: “49 cattle at 16s the piece, 210 sheep at 2s, 90 calves, 200 piglets.” The bill from the Poultry Department recorded a payment of £67 13s 4d “to Thomas Cornyssh” for “capons, cygnets, hens, partridges, pheasants, herons, ‘wypes’ [lapwing or curlew], coneys, ‘rabettes,’ chickens, milk, cream, butter, eggs and other victuals bought for the burial feast.”

  Although many of the details of the menus have been lost, the names of some of the feast’s suppliers have survived—even the name of the man who transported the chickens: “To William Strode for carriage of said poultry for 31 days with 5 horses £10 6s 8d.” The names are invariably male; the heraldic, knightly aspect both of ceremonies and of the accounts kept of them by the Chester herald and his like meant that mentions of women’s presence would be scarce. All the same, there are certain names whose absence is worth noting.

  It is not recorded whether Anne Neville, Duchess of Gloucester, was at Fotheringhay, despite the conspicuous part played in the event by her husband, Richard. Her presence may have gone unremarked, as her doings so often did, though surely, had she been there, she would have made her offering before Margaret Beaufort. Her absence may simply have been due to a pregnancy. If it was around now that Anne’s one child was born, and if she was newly delivered or even still pregnant, it might be good reason not to risk an arduous journey. The logistics, in any case, would have been against her coming; there had been no role for her in that stylized procession of a journey.

  But for this period of Anne’s marriage at least, there are mentions of her in other records. In 1475–1476 there is a message from her to the city of York, conveyed by one of her husband’s councilors and suggesting—as would indeed be the norm—that she was able to deputize for him in his absence. In 1476 she was admitted to the sisterhood of Durham cathedral priory; the following year, she and Richard would both join the guild of Corpus Christi at York, and she joined her husband in funding a chantry at Queens’ College Cambridge. At the beginning of December 1476, some of Richard’s payment warrants, issued from London, show purchases of furs and silk for “the most dear consort of the lord duke.” So there is probably no reason to read anything sinister into Anne’s absence—but one other omission from the list of attendees, however, does look more pointed.

  It is hard not to read something into the apparent absence, from the Fotheringhay ceremony, of the woman with most reason of all to be there—Cecily, Duchess of York, the dead man’s widow. It is true that royalty did not customarily attend funerals and that a woman might in any case have no place at the actual funeral ceremony of a man. But this was not a funeral as such, and neither the king nor the queen felt obliged to stay away from the occasion.

  Cecily may simply have been ill; she was, after all, past sixty—old for the day. Alternatively, it is possible that she simply watched the ceremony, instead of taking part. But when Margaret Beaufort, for example, would watch rather than participate in similarly important ceremonies during her son’s reign, her presence would be recorded. If Cecily had indeed been absent entirely, the question has to be why. It is possible “proud Cis” couldn’t stand having to play second fiddle to the daughter-in-law she despised as a lowborn interloper—not at this of all ceremonies. Cecily and Elizabeth Woodville would not, in this story, be the only mother- and daughter-in-law who did not always agree.

  There are signs from this same year of possible strains in Cecily’s relationships, not only with her daughter-in-law but with her own children as well. It is tempting to read between the lines of a letter written in October 1476 by a member of the Stonor family. Elizabeth Stonor writes to her husband of how she had attended the Duchess of Suffolk—the king’s sister Elizabeth—on a visit to Cecily Neville. “And also on Saturday last was I waited upon [the duchess] again, and also from thence she waited upon my lady her Mother, and brought her to Greenwich to the King’s good grace and the queen’s: and there I saw the meeting between the King and my lady his Mother. And truly me thought it was a very good sight.” It sounds almost as though Cecily failed to meet her daughter-in-law, even though Elizabeth Woodville was obviously at Greenwich at the time of Cecily’s visit. Worse, it sounds as though Edward’s sister had to “bring” Cecily to see her son and that her meeting her son was thought worth commenting on—an indication that all was not well at the very highest levels of the house of York.

  But there are signs also that Cecily had been trying to mend the rifts within her family. One letter of Cecily’s perhaps written in 1474 had been to her son Richard, and there is the sound of a mother’s finger-wagging in its lines. “Son,” Cecily wrote, “we trusted you should have been at Berkhamsted with my lord my son [Edward] at his last being there with us, and if it had pleased you to come at that time, you should have been right heartily welcome. And so you shall be whensoever you shall do the same, as God knoweth, whom we beseech to have you in governance.” Though this need not reflect anything more than a mother’s natural desire to see as much as possible of her son, one could also perceive a desire to bind ties in what had long been shown to be a dangerously fractured family.

  The ranks of Cecily’s children had been diminished, at the start of 1476, by the death of her eldest daughter, Anne, in childbirth. Four years before, in 1472, Anne had obtained what the sixteenth-century chronicler John Stow called a divorce (probably an annulment) from her estranged husband, the Duke of Exeter, and married her long-standing lover, the Kentish gentleman Thomas St. Leger. By contrast, Cecily’s second daughter, Elizabeth, the Duchess of Suffolk mentioned by Elizabeth Stonor, was enjoying an access of independence and influence after the death of her formidable mother-in-law, Alice Chaucer, in 1475, just the year before. But this particular scion of the York family seems, nonetheless, to have taken little personal part in political affairs.

  Political affairs, on the other hand, were the daily concern of Cecily’s youngest and grandest daughter, Margaret of Burgundy. And as 1477 dawned, Cecily must have been worried about her daughter across the Channel as much as, if not more than, her other children.

  When she had married Duke Charles in 1468, Margaret had entered a court, and a political system, where the duchess was expected to play a comparatively active role, this despite the fact that her new husband was more than a decade older than she, a man strongly committed to his own rule, ferocious in war and frequently away, relaxing into the company of his fellow soldiers. Attention at first was likely to have focused on how she would do with a consort’s prime duty: the provision of heirs. This Margaret would never manage, for reasons we do not know, and Charles’ existing daughter, Mary, remained his sole heiress. Although before her arrival he had told his subjects as a matter of prime importance that his bride was “ideally shaped to bear a prince,” there is no sign of the kind of frantic and reproachful flailings after a male heir in which Margaret’s great-nephew Henry VIII of England would indulge.

  It seems possible Charles adapted with the readiness of relief to the idea of a more distant marriage. Only a few years into the alliance, records of their movements show the pair were quite literally almost never together, though relations seem to have been amicable. With Charles at the wars, Margaret nonetheless retained enough hope to make offerings to those saints associated with childbirth and fertility: Waudru, Margaret of Antioch, Colette, Anne. In 1473 she made an unusual two-month trip to a palace especially designated as a place of cure and recovery; her trouble may possibly have been the loss of a child.

  Alone or in company with the stepdaughter (with whom, as with her mother-in-law, she seems to have gotten on well), Margaret traveled indefatigably, raising men and money for her husband’s campaigns and receiving petitions and ambassadors in his frequent absences. Her secure position survived not only the childlessness that would destroy Henry VIII’s queens, but also the political turmoils in England that cast into doubt her other prime function, as living
guarantor of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance.

  Margaret’s security, however, would not last. Duke Charles, having made his own truce with the French, had been fighting on his other frontiers throughout 1476. In the frozen month of January 1477 came news—filtering only slowly, though, to his womenfolk and to his foreign allies—that he was dead. Immediately, King Louis of France laid claim to a significant part of his lands.

  It was lucky Margaret at thirty-one already had considerable experience of the swift reverses of fortune, for she had quickly to play an active role in Burgundian affairs. She and her stepdaughter (Mary as the new ruling duchess and Margaret under the title of Duchesse Mère) acted together to summon the Burgundian parliament, the Estates-General, and urge the individual cities and provinces that made up Burgundy to resist the French invaders, to buy diplomatic time by a letter to Louis pleading for the protection due to “widows and orphans.” (Louis’s first response was to suggest a marriage between the twenty-year-old Duchess Mary and his seven-year-old son, the Dauphin—who, of course, had two years before been betrothed to Elizabeth of York as part of that peace treaty.)

  In the course of a fraught spring and summer, the two women would pull off the deal, but things got worse before they got better. Margaret and Mary had to cope with the arrest and execution, by the Estates-General, of their most trusted advisers; the former had also, like so many widows, to battle for her dower rights, withheld on the grounds her brother had never paid all the dowry he had promised. That battle finally ended when Mary intervened on behalf of Margaret—a woman who, she said, had always held “our person and our lands and lordships in such complete and perfect love and goodwill that we can never sufficiently repay and recompense her.”