Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  But Margaret also had two other things with which to cope. The first was a whispering campaign against her sponsored by the French king. Before her marriage, he had spread rumors about her chastity. Now, he spread a different story, which would have repercussions in England in the year ahead. The second, and more pressing, fact was that her brother Edward was not going to send military support or risk his own rapport with (and pension from) the French to support her, now that Louis was attacking her dower lands.

  Margaret wrote to Edward in the strongest terms, protesting that although he had once made her “one of the most important ladies in the world,” she was now “one of the poorest widows deserted by everyone, especially by you.” She implored him to send a thousand or more English archers “to rescue me from the King of France who does his best to reduce me to a state of beggary for the rest of my days.”

  Although Edward did write to Louis on her behalf, Margaret was deeply dissatisfied with her brother, and, as events would prove, she was not a woman to take dissatisfaction lightly. Nor was she the only one of the York siblings to feel aggrieved. Just two years after the triumphant symbolism of the Fotheringhay ceremony, the Yorkist dynasty and its matriarch, Cecily, were wracked by the fate of her second son, Clarence.

  _______________

  *Elizabeth of York would own Fotheringhay eventually, and her death would mark an end to its warm association with the royal family. Elizabeth of York’s granddaughter Elizabeth I would have another of her descendants beheaded there, and now the name of Fotheringhay will forever be associated with that of the Scots queen Mary.

  13

  MOTHER OF GRIEFS

  Alas, I am the mother of these griefs;

  Their woes are parcelled, mine is general.

  THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD THE THIRD, 2.2

  George, Duke of Clarence, had long been a disaffected stirrer of trouble. For ten years, he had been his brother’s heir, which had given him what in modern terms would be called an exaggerated sense of entitlement. History, however, sees him less kindly. Clarence has gone down as, in Shakespeare’s words, “false, fleeting, perjured Clarence,” and this reputation is bound up with the story of the women around him.

  Clarence’s wife, Isabel Neville, had died at the end of 1476, just before Christmas, less than three months after giving birth to a son. This baby, Isabel’s third living child, very shortly followed her, and (though a local chronicler definitely links the event to the childbirth) rumors would soon accrue around their deaths.

  The first effect of Isabel’s death was to make Clarence an available widower. The Crowland chronicler reports that Margaret of Burgundy, “whose affections were fixed on her brother Clarence beyond any of the rest of her kindred,” now devoted her energies to reviving the old idea of a match between him and the heiress Mary of Burgundy, the same woman whom the French king Louis wanted as a match for his young son. But, just as when the idea had first been mooted almost a decade before, King Edward refused his permission.

  Perhaps it is true that, as Crowland claims, Margaret was deeply attached to her brother Clarence, though there is no particular evidence for it. (One suspects that those relatives who did retain most affection for Clarence were those at some distance from him.) They may indeed have suffered from a common anger, a shared sense of disillusionment with Edward insofar as he had seemed to put their welfare second to other concerns. Clarence too had been in favor of the military intervention in Burgundy rejected by Edward—a thwarted hope that may have given him an additional bond with his sister.

  What wasn’t said in Crowland was that the siblings may all to some degree have been victims of the French king, who was still trying to break up the anti-French alliance established between England and Burgundy. Now French envoys, keen to weaken the new Duchess Mary by disabling one of her most powerful advisers, spread the story that Margaret and certain English lords might have Mary kidnapped and taken to England to marry Clarence; the same envoys whispered into Edward’s ear the poisonous suggestion that Margaret and Clarence, this marriage with the heiress made, would use Burgundian troops to seize the English throne. (Burgundy itself, in the person of Mary, had a claim to that crown, as she was descended through her grandmother from John of Gaunt.)

  There is no reason to believe the charges; within a couple of months of Duke Charles’s death, Margaret and Mary alike were actively seeking the long-planned marriage between Mary and Maximilian, the Archduke of Austria and son of the Holy Roman Emperor, which finally took place in summer 1477 to the satisfaction of all parties immediately concerned.

  But Clarence’s past history must have made even the most damaging rumors all too credible. Any whispers of a stronger Anglo- Burgundian link could—assuming they had not been instituted by the French king himself—have broken the fragile peace with France and thrown that country back on their old alliance with the ever-troublesome Scots. Whatever the rumors, no intervention by either Louis or Margaret may have been necessary: Clarence had an almost unparalleled capacity for making trouble on his own.

  In the spring of 1477, Clarence was involved in two bizarre trials. The first was the result of his accusing one Ankarette Twynho, formerly a servant to Clarence’s wife but now perhaps come into the Woodvilles’ sphere, of having given Isabel poisoned ale (given on October 10, though improbably not causing death until December 22). Two others were accused of having joined with her to poison also Isabel’s baby, which died ten days later. Ankarette was snatched from her home by Clarence’s men and taken across three counties to Warwick, where Clarence held sway. There, despite the absurdity of the charges, she was found guilty by a jury, who later pleaded that Clarence had left them no choice, and executed on the spot.

  A few weeks later, in an apparently unrelated case, three men were tried and convicted in London for “seeking the destruction of the King and Prince,” as Crowland reported, by seditious means but also by necromancy—witchcraft. At least one of the men was a close associate of Clarence’s, who later, in May, stormed out of the king’s council, having had the men’s declarations of their innocence read.

  Clarence was displaying a flagrant lack of respect for the due process of the law and also for the king’s authority. Crowland relates how the king summoned the duke to Westminster and inveighed against his behavior “as derogatory to the laws of the realm and most dangerous to judges and jurors throughout the kingdom.” The two had, as the continuator describes, come to look upon each other with “un-brotherly” regard. In June, Clarence was himself arrested and sent to the Tower.

  At the beginning of 1478, Clarence was attainted on a rhetorically elaborate charge of treasons past and present. The parliamentary sessions in which he was tried began on January 16. The date reflects the complicated life of the York family, for January 15 had seen, by contrast, a resplendent wedding ceremony. Early in 1476, the last Mowbray Duke of Norfolk had died, leaving only an infant daughter as heir, and Edward had immediately collared the heiress, Anne, for betrothal to his younger son, the four-year-old Richard. Now, two years later, he seized on the chance to have the marriage formally celebrated—despite the youth of the participants—in the presence of many of his nobles assembled for a very different purpose.

  It was Elizabeth Woodville’s brother Anthony, Earl Rivers, who led the little girl into the king’s Great Chamber, where the whole court was gathered to receive her—a daunting experience for a five- or six-year-old. The next day, followed by a train of ladies and gentle-women, she was led by Earl Rivers, again, and the “Count of Lincoln,” son to Edward’s sister Elizabeth, in procession through the queen’s chamber, the king’s Great Chamber, the White Hall, and into St. Stephen’s Chapel, hung with blue tapestry decorated with gold fleurs-de-lis, where under a canopy the royal family waited to receive her.

  The king gave the bride away, coins were flung to the crowd from gold and silver bowls brought in by the Duke of Gloucester, and after more spices and wine the banquet saw her seated at the head of the
first table and honored as Princess of the Feast. A few days later, there was a great tournament, at which the queen’s brother Anthony appeared as Saint Anthony the hermit, with a hermit’s house of black velvet—complete with a bell tower and a bell that rang—built into his horse’s trappings. The little duchess had to award the prizes—although she was assisted, in the interests of practicality, by the princess Elizabeth and a council of ladies.

  But beneath the ceremony, the Mowbray marriage is also noteworthy in the way it showed Edward’s own sometimes cavalier attitude toward the law. The king’s son had already been created Duke of Norfolk, anticipating presumably that it would be in the right of his tiny wife, and two Acts of Parliament were now passed to ensure that if she died before bearing children, her lands would pass to her “husband” rather than to her heirs-at-law. Anne Mowbray’s mother, the Duchess of Norfolk, Elizabeth Talbot, urged or forced out of much to which she was entitled, seems barely to have figured in the wedding ceremony. Neither, of course, did Clarence himself; he was in the Tower, only a few miles away from his family.

  Convicted by Parliament in a trial begun amid the merriment of his nephew’s wedding celebrations, Clarence was sentenced to death in the early days of February. When Edward hesitated for ten days before ordering that the sentence be carried out, the Speaker of the Commons asked the House of Lords to impose the penalty. He was executed on February 18—drowned, or so it is always said, in a butt of Malmsey wine. The story was certainly considered plausible enough that it was quickly repeated all over Europe, by de Commynes and the Great Chronicle among others. Clarence’s daughter would be painted with a wine cask as an emblem on her bracelet. The wine has served to lend a note of comic horror to Clarence’s death—but the bare facts of the case open the door to a wealth of speculation, not least as to who might have been involved in plotting Clarence’s downfall.

  Thomas More—writing in the next century and always Richard III’s detractor—claimed that some “wise men” believed Richard, acting in secret, “lacked not in helping forth his brother of Clarence to his death.” It is true that several of Richard’s men were in the Parliament that nodded through the attainder (as well, of course, as many of the Woodvilles’ adherents); it is true too that, inheriting some of Clarence’s titles and offices as well as his place in the succession, he greatly benefited from Clarence’s fall. But then, so too did Edward, who got Clarence’s great estates and needed the money; Margaret Beaufort must have noted with interest that the Richmond earldom—which in 1471 had been granted to Clarence for his life—was once again up for grabs after the execution. Almost everybody benefited from Clarence’s death.

  Mancini placed the blame for the events of 1478 very differently from More. Visiting England in Richard’s reign and perhaps susceptible to his propaganda, Mancini wrote that at this time, “Richard Duke of Gloucester was so overcome with grief for his brother, that he could not dissimulate so well, but that he was overheard to say that he would one day avenge his brother’s death.” Mancini clearly blames the queen, who had “concluded that her offspring by the king would never come to the throne, unless the duke of Clarence were removed; and of this she easily persuaded the king.” Indeed, More too would postulate as another possible cause of Clarence’s fall “the Queen and the lords of her blood, which highly maligned the king’s kindred (as women commonly not of malice but of nature hate them whom their husbands love).”

  Elizabeth Woodville and her kindred were, of course, always blamed for greed, and certainly the Woodvilles not only were prominent in the weeks and the councils that led up to Clarence’s trial, but also joined in the general harvest of Clarence’s goods and offices. Mancini says it was now, with Clarence dead and Richard lying low on his own lands, that Elizabeth Woodville really started to ennoble her relatives. “Besides, she attracted to her party many strangers and introduced them to court, so that they alone should manage the public and private businesses of the crown, surround the king, and have bands of retainers, give or sell offices, and finally rule the very king himself.” But as Mancini was also suggesting, there could have been another reason for Elizabeth’s particular animosity toward Clarence at this time. Mancini’s suggestion of “calumnies” against her—“namely that according to established usage she was not the legitimate wife of the king”—may have been just another rehashing of the old outcry against the secrecy of her marriage, her position as a widow. But it is also possible that Clarence was holding dangerous knowledge over his brother’s and sister-in-law’s heads.

  One theory suggests that Clarence had been dropping hints about a lady called Eleanor Butler to whom, it was alleged, Edward had been precontracted or indeed actually married in the early 1460s—a situation that would have made his subsequent marriage to Elizabeth Woodville invalid. Eleanor, who had died in 1468, had been daughter to the great Earl of Shrewsbury and a widow of rank and notable piety, whom Edward would have met at the very beginning of his reign. (More says that Edward boasted of having three concubines—the merriest, the holiest, and the wisest harlots in the kingdom. If Jane Shore was the merriest, Eleanor might have been the holiest.) Commynes says that Edward “promised to marry her, provided that he could sleep with her first, and she consented”—the same technique he practiced on Elizabeth Woodville. Commynes says also that Robert Stillington (later the Bishop of Bath and Wells) “had married them,” though his involvement would hardly have been necessary: witnessed consent and consummation alone would have done it. Mancini and Vergil also make reference to the story. The implication is that Stillington (who seems now briefly to have been cast into prison, possibly for something to do with the Clarence affair) had passed this lethal information either directly to Clarence or else to Eleanor’s sister the Duchess of Norfolk and her husband, friends of his, and the same couple whose little daughter, Anne Mowbray, had just been snapped up as a royal bride.

  The evidence in favor of this theory is circumstantial: for example, Eleanor’s arranging for the disposition of her property in the form open to a married woman, rather than that possible only for a widow, as well as the suggestive coincidence of Stillington’s imprisonment. Against that, there are no signs that Edward and Elizabeth, after Eleanor’s death, attempted to regularize their liaison, as it would then have been possible to do. Thomas More, after all, muddied the waters considerably by saying that Edward was precontracted not to Eleanor but to another of his mistresses by whom he had had a child, a married woman of lower rank called Elizabeth Lucy; the question is whether More did so from ignorance or deliberately, in order to discredit a theory so potentially damaging to the Tudor dynasty under which he served.

  The most that can be said for sure is that Edward’s pattern of behavior with his women makes it impossible simply to dismiss the tale. But whether the allegation was true or false, if Clarence was indeed spreading this rumor, it lends added weight to the suggestions that Elizabeth Woodville believed him a threat to her children. The story of Edward’s prior relationship with Eleanor Butler would certainly reappear, greatly to the detriment of Elizabeth’s sons, a few years down the line.

  How did the other women in the family respond to this lethal rift between the York siblings—and what, more particularly, was Cecily Neville’s attitude? There can be no wholly authoritative answer. Crowland recalled after the event that in Parliament, “not a single person uttered a word against the duke [Clarence], except the king; not one individual made answer to the king except the duke.” It is said that Edward himself also later lamented that “not one creature” interceded for Clarence. But women, of course, would not be speaking in a Parliament anyway; whatever was said by them was said behind closed doors and was not recorded.

  But this needn’t quite be the end of the matter. A detective story teaches that one should look at what everybody did, not what they said, and it would appear that Cecily did nothing at the time—or at least failed to protest her son’s execution loudly enough to catch the ear of any reporters. It is oft
en said that it was Cecily’s pleading that won Clarence the right to choose his own manner of death, but evidence is hard to find. (The contemporary chronicler Jean de Roye wrote in his journal, the Chronique scandaleuse, that the dreadful sentence of hanging, drawing, and quartering had been commuted “by the great prayer and request of the mother,” but his nineteenth-century editor, Bernard de Mondrot, points out that the words of the mother were added between the lines, and in a later hand.) Certainly, Cecily had been conspicuous with the rest of the royal family when, the very day before the beginning of the Parliament that was to try Clarence, the little Duke of York was married to Anne Mowbray.

  Perhaps Cecily had at last given up on this particular branch of the Yorkist tree. It was, after all, Clarence who had impugned her chastity; one of the grounds on which Clarence was accused was that he had “upon one of the falsest and most unnatural coloured pretences that man might imagine, falsely and untruly noised, published and said, that the King our Sovereign Lord was a Bastard, and not begotten to reign upon us.” Others have seen this very differently. One theory is that it was Cecily who actually offered Clarence the idea of her adultery, in pursuit of the family good. This was arguably a world where loyalty to the family as a whole might sometimes take precedence over loyalty to an individual, and that question would be even more crucial for the York family in the years ahead. These were the stark choices Cecily would have to contemplate—not once, but repeatedly.

  It would seem Cecily accepted Clarence’s death—but it may also have significantly altered her life. From this point it becomes increasingly hard to find mention of Cecily taking part in court rituals. Naturally, the business of running her estates continued. Besides her main residence, “our Castle of Berkhamsted,” letters are signed from “our place at Baynard’s Castle” and from the priory at Merton.