Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  She never ceased to exercise her good ladyship: to administer her lands and insist on her dignities. One letter, to an officer she felt had failed her over the administration of her East Anglian lands, warns him of “the awful peril that may ensue with our great displeasure and heavy ladyship.” She can be glimpsed licensing seven men in Thaxted to form a fraternity in 1481, joining in Edward’s petition on behalf of a Carthusian monastery outside London’s walls.

  In the retirement of Berkhampsted, Cecily seems to have adopted a life of increasing piety. A few years later, Cecily’s daily regime was recorded at length for posterity. By the time this description was written, Cecily had chosen to lead what was in many ways the life of a nun, albeit without retiring to a convent. This was a choice made by a number of wealthy widows, an increasing number of whom, in the last decades of the fifteenth century, were choosing to become “vowesses.” But in Cecily’s case, it is tempting to speculate that the traumas she had experienced during her life at court had led her, instead, to choose this almost cloistered existence.

  “She is accustomed to arise at seven o’clock and has ready her chaplain to say with her matins of the day, and matins of Our Lady; and when she is full ready she has a low mass in her chamber.” After all those early devotions, she would eat—she “takes something to recreate nature,” as the account puts it—before returning to chapel for three more services before the dinner that was the main meal of the day.

  After dinner, at last, there came a time for other business and for recreation. “After dinner she gives audience to all such as has any matter to show to her by the space of one hour; and then she sleeps one quarter of an hour, and after she has slept she continues in prayer to the first peal of evensong; then she drinks wine or ale at her pleasure.” She heard several more Evensongs before supper, and it was only after the repast that Cecily “disposes herself to be familiar with her gentle-women, to the following of honest mirth; and one hour before her going to bed, she takes a cup of wine, and after that goes to her private closet, and takes her leave of God for all night.” By eight o’clock she was in bed. The account gives a rare and fascinating picture of how a medieval lady might actually divide up her day—but it also, of course, shows a level of religious observance that would have been excessive for an ordinary laywoman even in that day.

  Cecily had chosen what the age called the mixed life: the “medled [sic] life that is to say sometime active sometime contemplative,” as it was described by the late-fourteenth-century northern cleric and author Nicholas Love, a translation by whom of the Life of Christ was in Cecily’s library. So too was the Letter on the Mixed Life, written by Love’s associate Walter Hilton, while another of her volumes, The Abbey of the Holy Ghost (of which Cecily’s daughter Margaret of Burgundy owned a copy), was written to teach those “unable to leave the world how they might build an abbey in their soul and keep the rules of an order in their heart.”

  Cecily’s books, indeed, reveal a great deal about the workings of her mind and heart, particularly the intense religious aspect of her later years. She owned copies of De Infantia Salvatoris (apocryphal stories of the miracles of Christ’s infancy) and of the ever-popular Legenda Aurea, the Golden Legend. But she also owned copies of the lives and visions of the great female mystics like Matilda of Hackenborn, Saint Bridget of Sweden, and Saint Catherine of Siena. It was Saint Catherine who advised those who wished to follow her example, but were still constrained by the demands of the world: “Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee.”

  Cecily’s piety has traditionally been seen almost as a psychological alibi that allowed her tranquilly to sail above the turmoils of her family. She must often in her life have needed the sense of a special relationship with God and might have reflected on the biblical stories of brothers’ struggles: Esau and Jacob, whose mother, Rebecca, showed the latter how to snatch his elder brother’s birthright); Joseph, whose brothers collaborated to kill him; and David, chosen to be the king of the Jews above his elder brother Elijah.

  It is conceivable that Cecily too found in her faith at least an angry affirmation of and vindication for the vicissitudes imposed upon her family and those they had imposed upon themselves. Nicholas Love, in his early-fifteenth-century Mirror of the Life of Christ, has Christ tell his pilgrims, “If the world hate you, witeth [knoweth] well that it hated me first before you.” In the years of Cecily’s childhood, Thomas à Kempis had written in his De Imitatione Christi of the rashness of relying on anyone but God, of the triumph in the Last Judgment of the oppressed over the oppressor: “Then shall rightwise men stand in great [constaunce] against them that have anguished them and oppressed them.” At the very least, Cecily must have needed the power of prayer to clear and focus the mind—to achieve that state of integration and acceptance that modern-day observers would couch in psychological, and medieval Europeans in spiritual, terms.

  Like many devout women, Cecily probably made a particular identification with the Virgin Mary, an empathy that would have been particularly relevant for a mother who had lost two sons to political strife. Saint Bridget’s prayer The Fifteen Oes specifically encourages the devout to share the pain of Christ and of the Virgin; a few years later, Margaret Beaufort would collaborate with Elizabeth of York to commission a printed version from Caxton. A shared religious enthusiasm was a very powerful link between almost all of the most powerful women in the Cousins’ War: a socially and morally acceptable way, perhaps, of evading or triumphing over other divides. But in the case of Cecily—more even than of any of the others—Bridget’s urging that one would thus be able to feel another’s pain was surely unnecessary. Cecily had more than enough pain of her own.

  14

  “A GOLDEN SORROW”

  I swear, ’tis better to be lowly born,

  And range with humble livers in content,

  Than to be perked up in a glist’ring grief,

  And wear a golden sorrow.

  THE LIFE OF HENRY THE EIGHTH, 2.3

  The saga of Clarence’s death had shown the divisions in the ruling York family—but it had also shown the important and at times divisive role played in English affairs by Margaret, the dowager Duchess of Burgundy. Margaret would become a significant meddler in English dynastic concerns, but even the visit she made to her natal country in 1480 had a political purpose, one that, perhaps, highlighted the comparative lack of interest Edward IV’s other sisters seemed to play in public affairs.

  The life she had developed in Burgundy since her husband’s death in 1477 was, on a day-to-day level, a good one, despite the turmoils that had followed Duke Charles’s passing. She and her stepdaughter, Mary, had faced down the problems presented by internal disputes and French hostility, and they had won—and Burgundy was a prize worth fighting for: replete with the profits of trade; rich in tapestries, each one of which could cost a whole year’s income from a wealthy landowner; and cultivated with books. Tapestries and drawings show Margaret at falconry and the hunt; one, entitled The Bear Hunt, shows her sidesaddle on a horse led by a groom.

  As her stepdaughter Mary’s marriage to Archduke Maximilian bore fruit, Margaret stood godmother to her children. Her dower lands gave her a prosperous and well-maintained collection of villages and towns. She chose to make her main residence in Malines in Brabant, purchasing there a collection of adjoining houses that she extended and rebuilt, in redbrick decorated with white stripes, with a balcony on which she could display herself to the people. She installed gardens designed to be seen from her palace windows, as well as a tennis court, a shooting gallery, and hot baths. She had a chair of state, in the vast council chamber, upholstered in fine black velvet, and a study hung with violet taffeta, its beautiful books and manuscripts protected by a wrought-iron grill. She had her volumes on chess, her knives of ebony and ivory, her knight of honor and her doctors, her dogs, her horses, and her maker of preserves.

  All the same, it seems likely Margaret had also an abiding sense of grieva
nce (not least about her brother’s failure ever fully to pay her dowry): a touchy imperiousness, or a tendency to see herself as the beleaguered heroine of the story. She was a complex character, and there was a hint of mysticism about her religious feeling, despite the crusading practicality with which she tackled the reform of religious orders in her domain. In an odd echo of the dream Margaret Beaufort once claimed, Margaret of Burgundy claimed she had been visited in her chamber by the risen Jesus. The scene is described in a book written at her request soon after her marriage. She also had the encounter painted: in the vaulted bedchamber, by her blue and scarlet bed, Margaret kneels fully dressed on a rug, waiting to kiss the bleeding hand extended to her so delicately.

  A “beatific and uncovered vision” he was: naked under his crimson cloak, displaying his wounds, instructing her to make ready the bed of her heart—a bed in which she was to lie with him “in purest chastity and pure charity,” ready to receive his instruction that she should look well upon the fires of hell and the glory of God. Christ had entered her bedchamber so quietly that even her greyhound did not wake, but she was so wholly convinced of his coming that she kissed the covers of her bed his body had touched until the color was worn away.

  The same fanaticism that Margaret displayed toward religion could also surface in her secular affairs, skilled and competent though she might usually be. This trait would prove particularly disruptive in her dealings with her brother Edward, to whom Margaret—and Burgundy—now looked as an ally.

  Margaret returned to England in the summer of 1480 to encourage her brother in his goodwill toward Burgundy, to turn him away from the French, and to negotiate a match between Edward’s daughter Anne and Mary of Burgundy’s little son. The visit can be spelled out in fabric as described in the expenses of the Wardrobe Department: two pieces of arras “of the story of Paris and Elyn [Helen]” to help furnish a house for her use; forty-seven yards of green sarcenet, garnished with green ribbon for curtains; bed linen; and “great large feather beds.” A hundred servants were given new “jackets of woollen cloth of murrey and blue,” the Yorkist colors. Edward Woodville—he of the famous tournament in Bruges—returning across the Channel to escort Margaret back home, was given a yard of blue velvet and a yard of purple for a jacket; the twenty-four men who rowed her up the Thames in the king’s barge after she disembarked from the Falcon at Gravesend wore jackets embroidered with white roses (an embroiderer named Peter Lambard was paid a penny for each small rose). The horses Edward gave Margaret were harnessed in green velvet, garnished with gold and silver; the reins were of crimson velvet. They must have been easy on the hands, but Margaret’s mind would probably have been too busy to notice.

  Few princesses returned to their native land, unless they were like Marguerite of Anjou, disgraced and desperate or, in their widowhood, as surplus to the requirements of their marital country. This situation, however, was different; whatever Margaret’s brother may have thought, as he had contemplated arranging for her a fresh match in Scotland, she returned to carry out the agenda of her adopted land. As she was rowed upstream and into London, she must have been taut with a mixture of excitement, nostalgia, and tension. Past Greenwich, around the great loop of the river, her impatience would have grown as the City itself began to come into view.

  The cities of Burgundy had their own more ordered display of wealth, but there must have been a magic of memory in the very brawl of the streets that Margaret’s mind’s eye traced behind the forest of masts, streets where the shopkeepers sold everything from silks to strawberries, hot sheep’s feet to Paris thread, peasecods and pie, where an Italian visitor two decades later would write that in the fifty-two goldsmiths’ shops of one street alone there was such a magnificence of silver vessels that in Rome, Venice, and Florence together one might not find its equivalent. The Tower, London Bridge with its tall rows of houses, Baynard’s Castle: each of the sites would have come into view, and farther ahead, past another green burst of country, the spires and turrets of Westminster. This was her own old home city, each building surely familiar (had any more been put up, did she wonder, craning her neck to see?) and the vista surely colored with the special excitement London can bring.

  It was high summer, when the smell of rubbish and sewage from the open drains in the streets and the risk of infectious diseases that always mounted in the warmer months urged nobles out of the town, but Margaret was traveling the other way, into the stew of London. There was a house prepared for her at Coldharbour in Thames Street, near her mother’s Baynard’s Castle, and along the river from the apartment in Greenwich, her home in the first years of her brother’s reign. Edward gave a banquet at Greenwich in honor of her and of their mother; Richard even came down from the battles with Scotland to see her. Margaret’s sister Elizabeth visited too and must have been struck by her younger sister’s glory. Perhaps their presence made the absence of Clarence the more poignant; perhaps, too, there was some awkwardness in the adjustment of positions and protocols that had changed the youngest daughter of the house of York into the dowager duchess of a foreign power. But the reforging of relationships (which most princesses must have preserved, as in aspic, from the time they went away) would be important in the next reigns.

  The celebrations went well; the diplomacy was more edgy. If he yielded to Margaret’s persuasions and agreed to marry his daughter Anne to his sister’s stepgrandson, Edward stood to lose his French pension and that flattering match between the five-year-old Princess Elizabeth and the Dauphin. As far back as August 1478, Edward had been pushing for Elizabeth’s French marriage to go ahead, but Louis, at that time, was less than keen; a son and heir’s marriage was too important a tool of diplomacy to be squandered lightly. So it was surely no coincidence that Louis now chose this moment to attempt to placate the English royal family, not only sending over a delegation with Edward’s annuity of fifty thousand crowns but also offering an additional fifteen thousand a year for Elizabeth until she and the Dauphin were actually wed.

  The match Margaret was offering may have been all in the family, but that didn’t mean it was not keenly bargained over. Edmund asked whether Burgundy would compensate him, if promising them his daughter Anne cost him his French pension. He also proposed that Anne should come without a dowry. Margaret had to send home for Maximilian and Mary’s opinion, and the result was a compromise: Edward would allow English archers to reinforce the Burgundian troops and would actually declare war on France if they did not restore the plundered lands by Easter the following year; Burgundy would pay his pension if the French withdrew it. Anne would bring a dowry, albeit only half the one hoped for, but Burgundy would pay her an annuity until the marriage could be finalized. Margaret, meanwhile, gave her four-year-old niece a wedding ring set with diamonds and pearls and a chain on which—until her fingers grew—it could be hung.

  But no sooner had Margaret (by this time well into the second month of her visit) sorted out the details than she had word Maximilian in Burgundy had negotiated his own truce with the French, doubtless using the English rapprochement Margaret was negotiating as leverage. She feared that Maximilian’s duplicity would have angered her brother (who in fact took it with the calm of one who would have done exactly the same thing). One can only hope she did not take the double-dealing personally, but rather as evidence a woman’s diplomatic work is never done.

  The visit ended as it had begun, however, on a note of personal happiness. Edward accompanied Margaret as she rode out of London, on her way to Canterbury to visit the shrine of Thomas Becket. Before leaving from Dover, she spent a week at the Kent estate of Anthony Woodville, talking books and philosophy. Margaret had sent the printer William Caxton (who in Bruges had served also as her financial adviser) to England a few years before, and in 1476, Anthony had become Caxton’s patron, translating books for him to print. A stream of books emerged from Caxton’s press in the yard of Westminster Abbey: Chaucer, Malory’s stories of King Arthur, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy
, The Mirror of the World, Higdon’s Polychronicon, The Golden Legend, Aesop’s Fables, and The Life of Our Lady.

  After this agreeable intellectual interlude, Edward’s “well-beloved sister,” as he wrote to Maximilian, went home. She would continue to look across the Channel, as one of Edward’s successors would discover all too painfully. But, for the moment, England seemed established in comparative tranquillity.

  The years that followed, the first of the 1480s, saw business as usual for King Edward and his family. Elizabeth Woodville was now well established as a wielder of influence and distributor of patronage, endowing, for example, a chapel dedicated to Saint Erasmus in Westminster Abbey. The Merchant Adventurers had cause to be grateful for the “very good effort” she put into helping them to negotiate a reduction in the amount of subsidy demanded of them by the king. Effort had been made by several nobles, their records noted, “but especially by the Queen.” It is a useful reminder that these women were consumers and negotiators, patrons as well as parents, readers and (on their own estates) rulers. Even the young Princess Elizabeth had long had her own lands. (On November 4, 1467, the Calendar of the Patent Rolls records a “grant for life to the King’s daughter the Princess Elizabeth of the manor of Great Lynford, county of Buckingham.”)

  Sometime in 1477, Elizabeth Woodville had given birth to a third son, George, who died in infancy in 1479. Her sixth daughter, Katherine, was born in 1479, at Eltham, a favorite residence, and her last child, too, was born there in November 1480. This last baby was named Bridget after Saint Bridget, the former court lady turned religieuse who founded the Bridgettine order, turning from matters of the world to matters of the soul, as, perhaps, Cecily was doing. Margaret Beaufort was asked to carry the royal couple’s daughter when the child was christened at Eltham, a mark of high favor that showed how far she had come since having turned her back on the Yorkists during the Lancastrian Readeption: