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

  Mindfulness, of course, could go too far—from a wife’s viewpoint, anyway. Edward was always going to take the freedoms the age accorded to any wealthy husband, never mind a king, and avail himself of the services of mistresses. His wife, Elizabeth, must up to a point have accepted this, especially given the frequency of her pregnancies and retreats into confinement. But around this time, Edward began an affair that would become a matter of comment in the next reigns for its personal qualities, as well as its capacity for use in political propaganda—the affair with the beautiful merchant’s wife “Jane” Shore, as she is usually known. (Her real name was Elizabeth.) Yet despite Edward’s infidelity, these might be called the golden years for the Yorkist monarchy, for Elizabeth as much as for Edward. Their second son, Richard, was born on August 17, 1473, at the Dominican Friary in Shrewsbury, adding to the line of succession and surely making Edward more confident that his side of the Plantagenet family was secure on the throne.

  But the rifts that caused the Readeption were still evident. Indeed, there were rumors of the troubles that lay ahead. In February 1472, the first February after Edward’s resumption of the throne, Sir John Paston had written that the king and queen, with Clarence and Gloucester, had gone to Elizabeth’s own palace of Sheen: “Men say not all in charity; what will fall men cannot say.”

  George of Clarence and Richard of Gloucester had recently been on different sides of a deadly dispute, but now they had a new cause of enmity. The death of Edward of Lancaster, Marguerite’s son, had left his young wife, Anne, a widow—and potentially a hugely wealthy one. Warwick’s treason and death meant his estates reverted to the Crown; it seemed likely (though illegal) that his wife’s huge Beauchamp and Despenser inheritance would also be taken from her. Clarence’s wife, Isabel, was to be the first beneficiary. Warwick’s other daughter, Anne, Isabel’s younger sister, might also benefit—and, coincidentally or otherwise, Richard now showed a desire to marry her. But Clarence had no wish to see his brother share the bounty from the Countess of Warwick’s estates. The Crowland chronicler claimed that Clarence spirited Anne away to a house in London, disguised as a kitchen maid. Richard, discovering Anne’s whereabouts, moved her to sanctuary at the College of St. Martin-le-Grand while a deal was thrashed out. In April 1472, papal dispensation was granted for the marriage of two such close connections, Richard’s mother being Anne’s great-aunt. Richard had already had a clause put into the contracts ensuring him of Anne’s inheritance even if the dispensation failed to arrive. It is not known exactly when or where the ceremony took place, but marry they did: with the support of Edward—who can now more than ever, after Clarence’s recent treachery, have had no desire to see so much wealth and power concentrated in that brother’s hands—and also, it seems, with that of the queen, who had made a point in the preceding months of renewing a grant Richard held from her.

  None of the contemporary reporters hint at Anne’s feelings, unless it is the Milanese ambassador in France who, sometime later, in February 1474, sent a patchily erroneous report of enmity between Richard (who “by force has taken to wife a daughter of the late Earl of Warwick”) and Clarence (who feared this might deprive him of “Warwick’s county”). The “force,” of course, may well imply that the marriage was against Clarence’s will, rather than against Anne’s, but it would certainly be interesting to know how much say she really had in the affair.

  She may not have wanted any other choices. She and Richard had known each other as children when, between 1465 and 1468, Richard had been brought up partly in Warwick’s home of Middleham—so it is conceivable there was an element of affection involved. The early-seventeenth-century antiquarian George Buck, indeed, has Richard having held off from taking any part in the killing of Anne’s first husband, Edward, “in regard of this prince’s wife, who (as Johannes Meyerus saith) was [in the room with him and] was akin to the Duchess of York his mother, and whom also he loved very affectionately, though secretly.” Though there is no evidence for that, by the same token there is no evidence for the popular picture of Richard, perpetuated by Shakespeare, as a lank-haired hunchback, so deformed that the dogs bark as he limps by. Nothing else that is known of Richard—his prowess in battle, for example—suggests that there was anything about him that would have turned a girl away. And even Richard’s sudden pursuit of Anne does not necessarily have to do entirely with venality. Rous describes Anne herself as “seemly, amiable and beauteous, right virtuous and full gracious”—but that might have been a family chronicler’s partiality.

  But even if there was any element of affection between Richard and Anne, it would not have been considered as of prime importance. Their marriage was primarily a matter of property. John Paston reported that Clarence told Richard that “he may well have my lady his sister-in-law, but they shall divide no livelihood”—that he was welcome to Anne herself, as long as he did not expect to get the lands with her. If so, Richard was clearly uninterested in the lady without the lucre.

  With the royal brothers squabbling over the Neville lands, one woman was certainly robbed—Anne and Isabel’s mother, the Countess of Warwick, who after her husband’s death had fled to Beaulieu Abbey, only to find that on the king’s orders she was not permitted to leave. The appalled widow wrote pleading letters (in her own handwriting, “in the absence of clerks,” as she explained) not only to the king and to her sons-in-law themselves but also to “the Queen’s good Grace, to my right redoubted Lady the King’s mother, to my Lady the King’s eldest daughter [the six-year-old Elizabeth] . . . to my Ladies the King’s sisters, to my Lady of Bedford mother to the Queen, and to other Ladies noble of the realm.” But on this occasion, the female network was powerless.

  In June 1473, the countess was taken north to her new son-in-law’s castle of Middleham in Yorkshire. Rous describes her as “locked up,” by Anne as much as Richard. Her lands were to be shared out, in the chilling words of the Act of Parliament of May 1474, as though “she were naturally dead.”

  Middleham was a Norman keep, substantially modernized and impressive enough to earn the sobriquet Windsor of the North, but still built for war. The medieval age did not distinguish between castles and great houses—by this point houses were being built often with purely decorative crenellation and moats being converted into lakes. But Middleham was still a fully functional fortress. Northern houses were more likely to be for genuine defense, close as they were to England’s only land frontier—the border with the often-hostile Scots.

  It was in this imposing structure that Anne’s only child, Edward “of Middleham,” was presumably born, although the exact timing is unknown. One description of him might seem to suggest 1473, the date often given, but one chronicler would suggest 1476 to 1477, which is just before the first definite record of his existence, an instruction that he should be prayed for, along with his parents, in a chantry endowed for the purpose.

  There are a huge number of question marks over Anne, more than any other woman in our story. Rous says she and Richard were “unhappily married,” but there is little other evidence, and “unhappily” here may simply imply that it ended unfortunately. Still, to modern eyes, there is something worrying in Anne’s notable absence from the records—notable even by the standards of a fifteenth-century wife. In order to create a power base for himself, Richard needed to make use of his wife’s heritage and lineage—to present himself as the legitimate inheritor of Neville authority in the North. But perhaps that need made him all the more determined to limit her autonomy.

  While Anne, and the share of her mother’s fortune the 1474 act had granted her, was thus absorbed into the Yorkist structure, Margaret Beaufort had been working toward her own rehabilitation. Her unfortunate husband Stafford had died in October 1471 of the wounds he received at the battle of Barnet sometime earlier, and within eight months she had married again, this time in a match that would bring her into even better graces with the Yorkists.

  Margaret had, it seems, been fond of Stafford—
they celebrated their wedding anniversaries, feasting on plover and larks, sharing pleasures as well as property. If Edmund Tudor had been the father of her child, it was Stafford whose favorite house, in later years, she would painstakingly rebuild. After his death, she had for a time moved out of Woking and into the London home her mother owned—perhaps because she needed to put herself visibly on the market again.

  Margaret could not afford to remain unprotected. It cannot be known for sure at what point Margaret Beaufort really did start to shape her own destiny—the records of her business affairs do not distinguish between her own decisions and those of a husband until much later in her life—but surely it would be fair to speculate that it was now. The leading Beauforts had all been executed, so there was only the king who might have been expected to exercise direct control over her affairs, and for his part Edward must have been only too glad to see her married to a man seemingly wholly reconciled to the Yorkist monarchy—a man like Thomas, Lord Stanley.

  Margaret’s third (or, technically, fourth) marriage would be a matter of business, a partnership that would years later be to some degree dissolved, by mutual consent, when need no longer required and opportunity offered. Nonetheless, it was in its own terms a success story, with every sign that Stanley respected his wife’s abilities.

  Lord Stanley, a hardheaded man of property, was distinguished chiefly for his success in having kept himself clear of firm commitment to either side of the unpredictable war that had ravaged England for the past two decades. He was therefore not wholly trusted; all the same, by this juncture he had achieved the position of lord steward of Edward IV’s household. A widower, already with children, he was apparently content with the fact that no children would come from his marriage with Margaret. She, however, increased his status, while his position within the Yorkist regime fostered her security and that of her son, Henry.

  Henry Tudor, however, was by now far enough away that any benefit of his mother’s new alliance would be slow in reaching him. When Henry and his uncle Jasper had fled England, their ship, steering for France, had been forced by storms instead to make for Brittany. There Duke Francis received them courteously as guests—and bargaining chips, not permitting them to leave. Both Louis of France and Edward in England had tried to win Henry and Jasper out of Breton hands, Edward being convinced, Polydore Vergil says, that with them on the Continent he could never live “in perfect security.” But Duke Francis had refused, and there, for the moment, the matter rested, while Margaret went on consolidating her policy of reconciliation.

  A new war—waged, this time, outside England—would afford Margaret an opportunity to strengthen her ties with the Yorkists. When King Edward invaded France in 1475, in pursuance of England’s long-standing claim to the French crown, Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Stanley, was one of the lords accompanying him and selected to negotiate the final resulting treaty.

  The French expedition marked a significant point for another woman also. Before he left for the war, Edward brought his four-year-old heir and namesake back from Ludlow as nominal ruler, with the title “Keeper of the Realm,” all under his mother’s charge. The will the king made before his campaign acknowledged Elizabeth’s importance. His two eldest daughters were to have ten thousand marks each as a marriage dowry, so long as “they be governed and ruled in their marriages by our dearest wife the Queen and by our said son the Prince, if God fortune him to come to age of discretion”; otherwise—if the princesses should be so bold as to marry themselves, “so as they be thereby disparaged, (as God forbid)”—the dowry would be forfeited. The will also granted eighteen thousand marks (plus two thousand already paid) to Edward’s third daughter, Cecily, but then her marriage to the heir of the king of Scots was already arranged, to secure the Scottish border before the fighting forces went to combat the French. The York lands would go to Edward’s younger son Richard; the queen herself would have the revenues of all the lands she already possessed for her lifetime and also her personal property to dispose of as she would: “all her own goods, chattels, stuff, bedding, arrases, tapestries, verdours, stuff of household plate and jewels, and all other things which she now hath and occupieth.” She was named first of his ten executors: “our said dearest and most entirely beloved wife Elizabeth the Queen . . . our said dearest Wife in whom we most singularly put our trust in this party.”

  Elizabeth was granted forty-four hundred pounds a year for the maintenance of the king’s household, which she and her son Edward would now occupy. She was not in any sense given a regency of the sort that was well known in France, the sort Marguerite had sought; this was probably due partly to the memory of Marguerite, partly to the lack of recent precedent, and perhaps partly also to personality. Maybe Edward felt that Elizabeth’s gifts were more suited to protecting the interests of her children, and handling their property, than to ruling a country. All the same, it was a declaration of trust.

  The invasion of France had been planned in alliance with Burgundy, and Margaret of Burgundy had rushed to see her brothers Edward and Richard as they landed. But the war proved short-lived—to the annoyance of the more militant Richard—when Edward was easily persuaded to accept a peace treaty and a pension from the French, rather than pursue his claims to their throne. Margaret now had to mediate between her brother and her husband, who had been thus deprived of England’s aid against their common enemy. Commynes described the French and English kings meeting on a bridge and embracing through a grate. Louis joked that if Edward wanted to come and meet the French ladies, he would lend him the Cardinal of Bourbon for his confessor, “who he knew would willingly absolve him, if he should commit any sin by way of love and gallantry.”

  The peace ultimately was cemented not by the amorous intervention of Edward himself, nor only by the pension Louis granted him, but also by the promise of a marriage between young Princess Elizabeth and the Dauphin. As the treaty declared: “For the inviolate observation of the friendship, it is promised, settled, agreed, and concluded that a marriage shall be contracted between the most illustrious Prince Charles, son of the most powerful prince of France, and the most serene lady Elizabeth, daughter of the most invincible king of England, when they shall reach marriageable years.” Edward returned to his delighted capital, calling his eldest daughter Dauphiness and declaring she must have a new wardrobe in the French style. He would be losing one daughter, perhaps, but was gaining another: a fifth daughter, Anne (probably named for Anne Mortimer, through whom came Edward’s best claim to the throne), was born to the royal couple on November 2 that year.

  As part of the peace deal, the French king had offered Edward a ransom of fifty thousand crowns, ten thousand pounds, for Marguerite of Anjou, in exchange for her signing over to Louis all rights of inheritance in her parents’ lands. The wording of the documents denies she had ever been a queen of England, let alone one of the most active in that country’s history. Louis signed an agreement concerning “the daughter of the King of Sicily,” and it was as “I, Margaret, formerly married in the Kingdom of England,” that Marguerite herself was forced to renounce “all that I could pretend to in England by the articles of my marriage.”

  It was a new kind of humiliation, then, that Marguerite suffered as she made her way back to France. An entry in the roll of accounts reads, “To Richard Haute, esquire, paid as a reward for the costs and expenses incurred by him for conducting Margaret, lately called the Queen, from London to the town of Sandwich.” At the beginning of 1476, Marguerite was returned across the Channel to live as Louis’s pensioner, and this time there is no record of how she—who in the past had made her feelings so plain—felt about the decision. For a few years, she may at least have enjoyed a reunion with her father, but René of Anjou died in 1479. Holinshed, in his sixteenth-century chronicles, would take a moment to moralize on the subject, describing how “this queen” was “sent home again with as much misery and sorrow as she was received with pomp and triumph. Such is the instability of worldly felic
ity, and so wavering is false flattering fortune. Which mutation and change of the better for the worse could not but nettle and sting her with pensiveness, yea and any other person whatsoever that, having been in good estate, falleth into the contrary.”

  Hall describes an equally gloomy scenario: “And where in the beginning of her time, she lived like a Queen, in the middle she ruled like an empress, towards the end she was vexed with trouble, never quiet nor in peace, and in her very extreme age she passed her days in France, more like a death than a life, languishing and mourning in continual sorrow, not so much for herself and her husband, whose ages were almost consumed and worn, but for the loss of prince Edward her son.” Marguerite seemed fated to live out the rest of her days in this strange purgatory, haunted by her lost hopes for herself and her family and taunted by events even then unfolding in the kingdom across the Channel.

  12

  “FORTUNE’S WOMB”

  Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune’s womb,

  Is coming towards me, and my inward soul

  With nothing trembles.

  THE LIFE AND DEATH OF

  KING RICHARD THE SECOND, 2.2

  These were the mature years of Edward IV’s kingship. Time would prove that fractures within the Yorkist dynasty had never entirely healed, but for the moment at least they were concealed. In 1476 came a chance for the celebration of the dynasty. An illustration probably made around that time shows the royal court and the royal family in what seemed like an earthly equivalent to the order of the sacred Trinity they reverenced. The king and his men kneel on one side, Elizabeth and her ladies on the other, with her mother-in-law, Cecily, behind Elizabeth wearing as a cloak the royal arms of England. Everything was set for an extraordinary scene—and the Yorkists did not disappoint.