Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses Read online

  Overall, though, the tide was still running the Yorkists’ way. Philippe de Commynes heard that one reason London welcomed Edward back was his wife, Elizabeth. Not only had she borne a son in Westminster, but Londoners were grateful that she had retreated into sanctuary instead of expecting citizens to risk their lives and livelihoods to defend her position. As well as a private pleasure, she had become a political asset for Edward. The Parliament of 1472 would put forward a commendation “of the womanly behaviour and the great constance of the Queen.” At the times of their marriages, Marguerite of Anjou had looked a more suitable queen of England than Elizabeth Woodville, but now the positions were reversed.

  As for the other, Lancastrian, queen, the Arrival tells of the frantic, exhausting passage of Marguerite and her son around the West through the first days of May, Anne Neville perforce with them, though her state must have been pitiable—a fourteen-year-old cut off from her own family and now no use to her in-laws. On the afternoon of May 3, the Lancastrian army—powerful now in numbers, but exhausted by a thirty-six-mile march in “foul country”—had gotten as far as Tewkesbury. The ladies of the party retired to a nearby manor for the night, but the next morning—according, tellingly, to Hall, who also described Marguerite’s terrified dismay after learning of Warwick’s defeat—she rode around the field to encourage her soldiers.

  The Duke of Somerset and Marguerite’s son, Edward of Lancaster, led the Lancastrian forces; Edward IV and Richard of Gloucester (with Edward’s friend Lord Hastings and Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest son, now Marquess of Dorset) led the rather smaller but more experienced Yorkist troops. For the Yorkists, it was to be a flamboyant victory, albeit one so bloody that the fleeing Lancastrians were slaughtered even as they tried to cross the River Severn or seek sanctuary in Tewkesbury Abbey. Among the casualties was Marguerite’s son—the Lancastrian prince and Anne Neville’s husband—with question marks over whether he actually died in the battle or was put to death afterward, as other chroniclers suggest or state. Later historians long laid the deed at Richard’s door, although there is no evidence for this, and in any case Edward the king would surely have to bear the ultimate responsibility.

  Henry VI, Marguerite’s husband, now died too, in the Tower and in Yorkist custody. The Arrival says he died of “pure displeasure and melancholy”; others, including Fabian and Commynes, say he was killed by the eighteen-year-old Richard of Gloucester. As he struck, Richard is supposed to have said, “Now there is no heir male of King Edward the Third but we of the House of York!” There is no hard evidence for Richard’s involvement, let alone his words, but if they were true, Richard was ignoring Margaret Beaufort’s son, Henry Tudor, possibly because of the legitimation issue, or because of doubts about the validity of a claim passed through a woman. But one thing is certain: with no son or husband to promote, Marguerite would now have been considered irrelevant.

  Marguerite was found three days later, the Arrival reports, “in a poor religious house, where she had hidden herself, for the security of her person.” She appears to have hidden Anne too, since a list of those taken and presented to the king included “Lady Margaret, Queen, Lady Anne, Princess.” Whether or not Anne felt personal loss in her husband’s death, as an example of the turning of Fortune’s Wheel her year had been close to unrivaled. She now passed into the charge of her brother-in-law Clarence, who had been pardoned by his brother the king. By contrast, Crowland reports that when Edward made his triumphal entry into London, Marguerite was “borne in a carriage before the king,” as the Roman emperor would have done to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. The last days had brought the loss of those closest to Marguerite, the wreck of all her hopes, but (in keeping with the treatment generally accorded to women in these wars) she suffered no more direct penalty.

  Her father wrote his hope that God might help her with his counsels, “for rarely is the aid of man tendered in such a reverse of fortune.” Some sort of aid did soon come to Marguerite: Edward IV’s records show payment to one Bawder Herman “for the expenses and daily allowances to Margaret, lately called the Queen, and to other persons attendant upon the said Queen.” In fact (and possibly at Elizabeth Woodville’s persuasion), after the first few months of confinement Marguerite would be sent into the kindly custody of her old friend Alice Chaucer, the dowager duchess of Suffolk, at Wallingford, who was paid five marks a week for her expenses. She was probably even freed, at least to some degree; in 1475 she joined the London Skinner’s Fraternity of the Assumption of the Virgin, on the same occasion as two of Elizabeth Woodville’s ladies. (The queen herself was already a member.) Marguerite was, in other words, accepted back, if she had ever left them, into the networks of aristocratic women and by men accorded the half-patronizing, half-chivalric treatment seen time and again in the treatment of ladies.

  The Lancastrian “Readeption,” as it was called, was over, barely six months after it had begun.* This time—for this branch of the family—there would be no coming back. As one contemporary put it, “And so no one from that stock remained among the living who could claim the crown”—except, posterity would add, for Margaret Beaufort and any heirs of her body.

  Margaret Beaufort had shown all too clearly her pleasure in that brief restoration of the Lancastrian dynasty. That she did not now suffer any penalty is due to the actions of her husband, and what she felt about them we cannot know. When Edward reentered London, Stafford had been there to welcome him; at Barnet, where Warwick was killed, Stafford had been wounded fighting for Edward’s army. (In the last week of March, Margaret’s cousin Somerset, having taken on his dead brother’s role as one of the most prominent Lancastrian leaders, had visited Woking, trying to persuade Stafford to fight for their cause, but in vain. After Tewkesbury, this latest inheritor of the Somerset title too had been dragged out of sanctuary and killed: evidence of Edward’s determination and ruthlessness that Margaret would have taken seriously.)

  Jasper and Henry Tudor had been in Wales when they heard of the disaster that had overtaken the Lancastrians. Jasper would have had no option but to flee abroad: Bernard André says it was Margaret who begged him to take with him her thirteen-year-old son, Henry. With the deaths of Henry VI and his son, Edward of Lancaster, Henry Tudor had suddenly assumed a dangerous importance. As the direct descendant of John of Gaunt, Henry was the only Lancastrian heir available in England since his mother was at once disabled and protected by her gender.* Margaret would surely have been in contact with her boy before he and Jasper set sail from Tenby, but it would be fourteen years before she saw him again.

  _______________

  *Readeption, a term not readily found in the lexicon, was used by the Lancastrians themselves in official documents and has become the standard designation of Henry VI’s brief resumption of rule.

  *Several of the European royal families could also boast descent from John of Gaunt, but they would have seemed less pressing a concern to the Yorkists than a homegrown candidate.

  PART III

  1471–1483

  11

  “MY LOVELY QUEEN”

  Clarence and Gloucester, love my lovely queen,

  And kiss your princely nephew, brothers both.

  HENRY VI, PART 3, 5.7

  As the Yorkists returned to power, the Lancastrian threat, it seemed, had finally been eliminated. From now on, the only challenge would come from within. The years ahead would prove that was indeed a serious threat—but there was little sign of internecine strife in the summer of 1471. When the end of June saw the infant Edward, Elizabeth Woodville’s long-awaited son, named Prince of Wales, it was more than a routine appointment. It was a symbol that this time—so they intended—the Yorkists were here to stay.

  Just as significant, perhaps, was the fact that Queen Elizabeth was the head of the little prince’s council and that all the others named—the king’s brothers Clarence and Gloucester, the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville, the leading bishops—were given power to advise and council him only �
�with the express consent of the Queen,” as the official papers declared. Elizabeth Woodville could feel that the tribulations of the previous year were safely behind her. That September, king and queen went on pilgrimage to Canterbury, a favorite place, and at Christmas in Westminster they took care to display themselves going to mass in the abbey, “wearing their crowns,” though for the Twelfth Night procession Elizabeth went uncrowned, “because she was great with child.” This child, Margaret, was to die before the end of the year, a year that also saw the death of Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta, on May 30. Joy was mixed with sorrow—but all the same, in her public capacity, Elizabeth was riding high. Her husband’s opulent lifestyle gives some sense of what she herself would have enjoyed. The Liber Niger (Black book) of Edward IV, compiled between the summer of 1471 and the autumn of 1472, while intended in part to impose much-needed economies on the royal household, nonetheless described an impressive edifice, divided into two principal departments, the domus providencie (kitchens, buttery, laundry, and so on) and the domus magnificencie (the chapel, signet office, wardrobes, and those in closest attendance on the monarch).

  The queen’s household was on a smaller scale and would have included far more women. Even so, Elizabeth too had grooms and kitchen staff, clerks, auditors, carvers, almoners, attorneys who served on her council, butlers, bakers, pages and pursuivants, surgeons, and squires. Her offices—of course she had offices—at Westminster were in the New Tower, next to the king’s Exchequer.

  There is a good description from 1472 of the pleasure and state in which the royal family lived, in the great palaces close to the Thames: Greenwich, Eltham, Westminster, Windsor (so extensively remodeled by Edward III a century before), and Sheen. While Edward had been in exile in Burgundy, he had been entertained by Lord Gruuthuyse, whose palace is familiar to any visitor to Bruges today. Now it was the restored king’s chance to reciprocate, and the details of the visit Lord Gruuthuyse made to the court at Windsor are preserved in the account by the so-called Bluemantle Pursuivant, one of the heralds whose job it was to concern himself with questions of precedence and ceremony.

  After being greeted by the royal couple, and escorted to their chamber, the visiting party was offered dinner there, in the company of a number of English officers, and then taken back to the king. Afterward, the king led him to the queen’s chamber, “where she had there her ladies playing at the marteaux [a game like bowls], and some of her ladies and gentlewomen at the Closheys [ninepins] of ivory, and Dancing. And some at divers other games, according.” The king danced with his daughter Elizabeth, and so they parted for the night.

  The next morning came Matins and mass in the king’s own chapel, after which Edward gave Lord Gruuthuyse a gold cup garnished with pearl and with a great sapphire and “great piece of a Unicorn’s horn.” After breakfast came hunting, dinner in the lodge, and more hunting, with a half-dozen bucks pursued by hounds and killed near the castle. “By that time it was near night,” the herald writes, “yet the King showed him his garden, and Vineyard of Pleasure, and so turned into the Castle again, where they heard evensong in their chambers.”

  Elizabeth did her part in honoring Gruuthuyse, ordering a great banquet in her own chamber, with dancing after it. “Then about nine of the clock, the King and the Queen, with her ladies and gentlewomen, brought the said Lord Gruuthuyse to three chambers of Pleasure, all hanged with white silk and linen cloth.” The floors were covered in carpets—then a great luxury—and the counterpane of cloth of gold, furred with ermine, and the herald took care to record that the queen herself had given orders about the visitor’s bed linen. Notable too (along with the charming description of Lord Gruuthuyse ending a wearing day by lingering in the bath, in company with the lord chamberlain) is the way that access to the queen’s chambers was being set up as a privilege in the chivalric style, and also as a place where monarchy could be seen—and displayed—in its most accessible and human guise.

  This was an age when greater privacy was in demand, and even the earlier generations of great noble builders such as Edward III or Lord Scrope at Bolton Hall had already started to use the great hall, once the all-purpose center of the house, only for big public functions. These great nobles had looked to their peers on the Continent for inspiration, daring to require more rooms (albeit still multifunctional), privies, fireplaces, and chimneys, more painted walls and tiled floors. But what cannot be seen today, when one goes around these palaces, is the sheer riot of color that would once have clamored inside them: textiles, tiles, painted glass, bright wooden roofs and corbels, to say nothing of clothes and livery.

  In these ways and others, Elizabeth and Edward would have been anxious to follow the new trends, ushering in a newer and more modern style of life in England. Wood paneling instead of wall hangings was just coming into style, as was translucent glass. There was a new spirit of luxury and comfort in the air. Sir John Fastolf’s fifty-room brick castle of Caister could boast feather beds and forty wall hangings, collections of jewels and plate, an astrolabe (or astrological instrument) in the owner’s bedroom, and books in the bathing chamber. Back in 1456, so the Paston letters record, Cecily Neville had “sore moved” Sir John to sell her the place, so impressed was she.

  The great houses each had their gardens: the formally enclosed plots with their herb beds and their rose bowers, their lavender and their lilies, and the half-wild meadow with the sweet scent of the elderflower in spring and the soapy smell of hawthorn. Smell was important in the medieval world: a sweet odor was one of the signs by which a saint could be identified—an indication that holiness was nearby. Sight, too, could be a way to God, and whereas in winter visitors to Windsor might have had to make do with the images in the chapel (Edward bought a fabulous gold statue of the Virgin for the chapel there), in summer, as they walked on short turf carefully dotted with violets and the daisies Chaucer loved, the blue of the columbine might have reminded them of the Virgin’s robe, golden heart of a honey-scented oxlip the promise of her heavenly crown. In art and literature, even the paths through an orchard could become an allegorical rendition of a saint’s mystical dialogue with God. When Gruuthuyse visited in autumn, the swell of the fruit on trees and grapes on vines would have brought their own message of God’s favor, of promise and prosperity.

  Even amid these cheery distractions, however, there were hints of foreboding. Not all symbols and allegories brought the promise of heavenly comfort. The year 1472 saw a comet that blazed across the sky for almost two months; no one knew what the ever-changing portent meant. The next year brought fevers and a bloody flux, and it was through a troubled landscape that in the spring of 1473 the two-and-a-half-year-old Edward was sent to Ludlow, on the borders of his Welsh principality, with Elizabeth’s brother Anthony destined to be his governor. Anthony was, in Mancini’s words, “a kindly, serious and just” man, one whose spiritual leanings reputedly led him to wear a hair shirt underneath his courtly garments. Both educated and gifted as a military commander, he was undoubtedly well suited to his task.

  Anthony was not the only Woodville to be assigned to the young prince. Two of Elizabeth’s other brothers were the young prince’s counselors and another his chaplain, while her son by her first marriage—assisted by her cousin—became his comptroller and her brother-in-law by her first marriage his master of horse. Abbot Mylling, who had been so kind to Elizabeth in sanctuary, became his chancellor. In the years ahead, such a comprehensive placing of Woodville connections about the boy would come to prove a vulnerable point, creating mistrust among the nobility, but at the time it must have made Elizabeth feel safe. Still, when her son set out for Ludlow, she went with him, despite being once again pregnant, and stayed until autumn.

  The instructions his father sent for the rearing of the little prince sound a lovely domestic note. He was to rise “at a convenient hour according to his age,” hear Matins in his chamber and mass in the chapel, and then after breakfast “to be occupied in such virtuous learning as his ag
e shall suffer to receive.” Every care was to be taken as to his companions and his conversation at dinner, “so that the communication at all times in his presence be of virtue, honour, cunning, wisdom, and deed of worship, and of nothing that shall stir him to vice.” No “swearer, brawler, backbiter, common hazarder or adulterer” was even to be admitted to the household. After two more hours of lessons, he might “be shewed such convenient disports and exercises as belong to his estate to have experience in,” then after Evensong those about him were “to enforce themselves to make him merry towards his bed.”

  But Elizabeth’s role on this journey was not purely domestic and maternal: when the little Prince of Wales was sent to visit Coventry, Elizabeth could be found making friendly overtures to its officials. Her letter to the city assured them that a servant of her husband’s who had made a public disturbance there would receive no special treatment, “for as much as you shall now certainly understand that we do not intend in any way to maintain, support, or favour any of my said lord’s servants or ours in any of their riots or unfitting behaviour.”

  Elizabeth and her husband were particularly mindful of what you might call the women’s vote. When she visited Coventry in 1474, the city records show that she gave six bucks to the mayor and his colleagues—and six to their wives. The Great Chronicle of London relates how Edward, raising money for his wars, kissed an old lady to such effect that she changed her ten-pound donation into twenty pounds, and his welcome into London after the Readeption was said by Commynes to be in part due to the “ladies of quality and rich citizens, wives with whom he had formerly intrigued,” and who forced their husbands to declare for his side.