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

  Elizabeth and her husband, Henry, lie side by side in unemotional gilt splendor, on a plinth of Italian marble. They are gazing upward to God, and God sees them clearly: two gold images, almost sanctified by their beauty. Static, stationary, in their tranquillity, emphasizing the message of Henry VII’s Lady Chapel, prominently placed to the east of the high altar: the Tudors were here to stay.

  Look upward above the tomb of Henry and Elizabeth, and you see the Beaufort portcullis, the Tudor rose, and the French fleur-de-lis. Leland called the chapel “miraculum orbis universali,” the wonder of the entire world, not only for its myriad carvings—the saints in their ranks, the beasts of heraldry—and its stained glass, now long lost, but also for the soaring arches of the roof. Henry VII’s dream of seeing Henry VI canonized and “translated” here had never to become reality, but both Henry and Margaret Beaufort had poured money into the project—some twenty thousand pounds, or roughly seven million pounds today.

  Elizabeth lies with eyes open and hands folded in prayer, in a furlined robe and with her feet resting on a royal lion. Torrigiano can never have seen Elizabeth of York—the image was only completed fifteen years after her death—so this may be a standardized royal image, or may be guided by her effigy. The result has been called the finest Renaissance tomb north of the Alps, with gilded putti and curling foliage jostling the greyhound and the Tudor dragon. But the point—the point of the whole chapel—was not Elizabeth herself, but rather the dynasty she helped to found.

  In the south aisle of the Henry VII Chapel are three freestanding tombs, those of Margaret Beaufort and two of her descendants: her great-great-granddaughter Mary, queen of Scots, and her great-granddaughter Margaret Lennox, the mother of Mary’s husband, Lord Darnley. It’s a distinctly crowded setting, given the quantity of white marble beneath which the Scots queen was reinterred in the seventeenth century. In the north aisle are two more of Margaret Beaufort’s great-granddaughters, the two English ruling queens Elizabeth and Mary. Since Henry VIII lies at Windsor—with his son Edward VI merely placed beneath the altar in Henry VII’s chapel—this has wound up being a monument not only to the Tudors as such, but also to the female side of history: a “Lady” Chapel—a chapel in honor of Our Lady, of the Virgin Mary, appropriately.

  None of the other women in this story has a tomb as visible as the ones in this chapel of Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth Woodville, interred with so little ceremony, at least got to share, almost unnoticed, her husband’s tomb at Windsor; Anne Neville is at least known to be buried in Westminster Abbey, although the site is not recorded. Although Cecily Neville is buried as she desired at Fotheringhay, the place never became the memorial to the Yorkist dynasty she had planned; indeed, by Elizabeth I’s day, the tombs had fallen into such disrepair she ordered them removed and replaced by a simple plaque elsewhere in the church. Even Margaret of Burgundy’s tomb in Malines was ransacked in the sixteenth century—by local iconoclasts, Spanish troops, or English mercenaries—so that no trace of any memorial can be seen today. Marguerite of Anjou was buried as she requested with her parents at Angers, her final resting place serving as evidence that the war in the country that should have been her marital home had not gone her way.

  But everything we know about these women suggests that their main imperative was dynastic—genetic. And the blood of Elizabeth Plantagenet and Henry Tudor—and therefore the blood of Margaret Beaufort, Elizabeth Woodville, and Cecily Neville—still runs in Britain’s royal family. The establishment of this legacy, surely, for them, outweighed whatever personal price they had to pay. It is the urge of our age to hunt for other legacies, for tokens of a personal existence. It was not necessarily a need they would have recognized. Among the women of this Cousins’ War, Margaret Beaufort fought hardest and most successfully for her bloodline. She is also the only one to leave another sort of legacy—a legacy of works—but even for her, that can only have been a secondary matter.

  The deadly dispute between cousins continued for the next century, with its contests mostly fought away from the battlefield, in arenas where women could compete more visibly. Elizabeth of York’s granddaughter “Bloody” Mary would dispute the throne with her kinswoman Jane Grey (descended from Elizabeth’s younger daughter Mary); Elizabeth Tudor would be forced to execute the queen of Scots, descended from Elizabeth of York’s elder daughter Margaret. But out of these women’s combined experience, out of the different models of female agency they embodied, would be born something more productive.

  If you look at England’s consort queens, from the Conquest to the Tudors, you may see a move toward confinement—toward mere domesticity, from the time when a strong woman “will be counted among the men who sit at God’s table” to one when any sign of such “manful” strength was a source of profound unease. Yet in the century that followed the Cousins’ War, the idea of the strong woman (something then seen almost as a third sex) was about to reach its apogee. Elizabeth I played upon all the ambiguities of gender, not least in the famous speech at Tilbury where, in the face of the oncoming Armada, she assured her soldiers that although she had the body “of a weak and feeble woman,” she also had “the heart and stomach of a king.” She reconciled, at least for her own lifetime, the problem with which Marguerite of Anjou had grappled in vain: that of reconciling the requirements of rule and the pressure to be “womanly.”

  In that later Elizabeth, of course, we have also a woman whose signal contribution to history was not genetic or dynastic. The so-called Virgin Queen confounded all the expectations of her own day by reigning in her own right, while the years of her rule saw the expansion of England’s interests, the securing of its borders, the regularization of its currency, the great flowering of the Renaissance, and the establishment of the religious settlement Britain still knows today. (She had effectively made possible a Protestant northern Europe.) In her reign began the adventures of exploration and trade, the mechanisms of political and religious toleration, that gave Great Britain its future prosperity.

  The achievements of that later Elizabeth have been, to all women since, her lasting legacy. And if Elizabeth of York was Elizabeth I’s physical progenitor, then perhaps she could trace back to Marguerite of Anjou a different kind of ancestry. Perhaps, even—however cruelly the wars had told upon her—that fact gives to Marguerite, too, a share in the ultimate victory.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book began with two conversations, each with writers more familiar than I with the pleasures and pitfalls of the fifteenth century. I was discussing with Alison Weir the possibility of basing a book around a place or an event, rather than a person, when the idea of a book on the battle of Bosworth first occurred to me—one from the viewpoint of the women affected. I was discussing that idea with Ann Wroe when she mentioned that she had always thought how interesting it would be to try to build an entire book around the Privy Purse expenses of one of those women, Elizabeth of York. I wasn’t quite courageous enough to take that on, but it did start me thinking about how the surviving records for the lives of the royal ladies might be used in a new way. It was George Lucas of Inkwell Management in New York who, eyeing my first proposal on Bosworth, said that since it was clearly the women who really interested me, why didn’t I just write about the women? But even since then, it has been a long journey.

  Along the way I have encountered the most extraordinary generosity. Susan Ronald most kindly made available to me her own research on Richard III. Besides Alison Weir, my text was read and improved by Ceri Law, while Julian Humphrys and George Goodwin corrected my blunders on military history, and Dr. David Wright checked my interpretation of certain Latin texts. What errors remain are all my own. Above all, thanks are due to Margaret Gaskin who, as so often before, answered the call of old friendship and came to my rescue over everything from questions of attribution to the family tree.

  I want to thank my commissioning editor, Lara Heimert, and all the team at Perseus. I owe much, also, to those authors whose work o
n the individual subjects and strands that combine to make up this book has been of such assistance to me. Every effort has been made to contact the owners of any copyrighted material reproduced, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publishers would be glad to hear from them so that the mistake can be corrected in future editions.

  A NOTE ON SOURCES

  There is very little, from the cupidity of Elizabeth Woodville to the culpability of Richard III, on which the historians of the middle and late fifteenth century agree. There is just one subject, however, on which they speak with remarkable unanimity: the inadequacy of their sources. J. R. Lander wrote that these were “notoriously intractable”—and it is especially true when it comes to dealing with women who fought in no battles and passed no laws. Charles Ross, biographer of Edward IV, lamented that “any discussion of motive and the interplay of personality in politics [were] matters generally beyond the range of the unsophisticated and often ill-informed and parochial writers of the time.”

  The sources for this period are sketchier even than one might find for eras considerably earlier. This was in part because the fifteenth century saw great change in the very writing of history. The monastic Latin chronicle, with a couple of honorable exceptions, was in decline; and though the baton was being passed to secular chroniclers—City merchants and the like, writing in the vernacular and often anonymously—their records were erratic and often confusing. In an age that showed few signs of anything we would recognize as a sense of authorship or provenance, the chroniclers and antiquarians frequently repeat and adapt each other. The writing of humanist history in the Italian style really came to England only at the beginning of the sixteenth century with Polydore Vergil and Sir Thomas More, as did the keeping of state papers of the kind on which students of Henry VIII onward rely. And though the records of state departments like Chancery, the Exchequer, and the law courts have been the subject of extensive study in recent decades, they do not satisfy the biographer’s thirst for motive and feeling.

  The records of royal life provide few personal letters of the kind we do find in, for example, the Paston papers. (Perhaps the fact that aristocratic letters were usually dictated militated against the written expression of intimate feeling—especially when the times were so very edgy, when you knew a friend could become an enemy.) There is, too, the fact that in the difficult days of the civil war, most reports were written very definitely from one side or the other. As Lander put it, introducing his book on the Wars of the Roses, “Many of the letters and narratives quoted in this book purvey biased opinion, wild rumour, meretricious propaganda and the foulest of slander as well as historical truth.” It was not just what someone, writing after the event, thought had happened, but, even more invidiously, what they wanted others to think had happened. Brief introductions will be given below to some of the most important contemporary writers, in an attempt to offer the reader some idea of their likely starting point, but for a far more extensive discussion of these points, see Keith Dockray’s introductions to his Source Books or the chapter “Writing History” in English Historical Documents, vol. 5.

  Any work of synthesis, such as this largely is, inevitably owes a great deal to the individual studies already published on its protagonists. Six of the seven women here have already been the subject of individual biographies, from the great Victorian works of Cooper, Hookham, and the like (see the Bibliography) to the sometimes less considerable works of the mid-twentieth century. More recently, Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood in The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby have produced a wealth of new detail on Margaret Beaufort, while Helen Maurer’s book Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England explored the whole question of queenship and power. Both Elizabeth Woodville and Elizabeth of York have benefited from new biographies by Arleen Okerlund, while Christine Weightman was able to bring a knowledge of continental sources to bear on her biography of Margaret of Burgundy (or “Margaret of York”). With these I would couple, as of prime importance, Joanna Laynesmith’s book The Last Medieval Queens: English Queenship, 1445–1503, while Lisa Hilton’s Queens Consort: England’s Medieval Queens and Helen Castor’s She-Wolves: the Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth provide an invaluable context.

  Michael Hicks has been brave enough to confront the sometimes-daunting lack of information for a biography of Anne Neville, but there has, at the time of writing, been no published study of Cecily Neville, though Joanna Laynesmith (née Chamberlayne) has written several valuable articles, and Michael K. Jones used his book on the psychological background of Bosworth to explore his controversial but fascinating theories. It is possible that the uncertainty surrounding several crucial points is enough to prohibit a biography as such; therefore, the source notes given here for Cecily are more extensive than for the other women in this book.

  NOTES

  Prologue

  the anonymous manuscript: Printed in The Antiquarian Repertory: A Miscellaneous Assemblage of Topography, History, Biography, Customs, and Manners, 4:655–663.

  the “Wars of the Roses”: The beginning and end points are themselves a matter for dispute. The preferred option now tends to be from 1455 to 1485—the battle of Bosworth—or possibly 1487 and the battle of Stoke. Nonetheless, some have seen this conflict as starting as early as 1399, with the seizure of Richard II’s throne by Henry IV, while others point out that 1471, with the death of Henry VI and his son, saw the end of any conflict between York and what could properly be called the house of Lancaster.

  matter as much as the battles: Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England, 167, cites Philippa Maddern in the Journal of Medieval History 14 (1988) on the important role of the Paston women in the “bloodless battles of land transactions, county rumour-mongering and client maintenance.”

  PART I: 1445–1460

  Chapter 1: Fatal Marriage

  seasick fifteen-year-old: Earlier writers have Marguerite born in 1429 rather than 1430, but this perception was corrected in an article of 1988 by C. N. L. Brooke and V. Ortenberg, “The Birth of Marguerite of Anjou,” Historical Research 61:357–358.

  Polydore Vergil: Vergil (ca. 1470–1555) was an Italian Renaissance scholar who came to England in 1501–1502 and was a few years later invited by Henry VII to write a history of England—the Anglica Historia, not completed until the reign of Henry VIII. When considering his views on, for example, events as controversial as those of Richard III’s reign, it is disconcerting to realize he can have had no firsthand knowledge of them, the more so since his writings have been among the most influential in blackening Richard’s name. Nonetheless, although writing in a Tudor, which effectively meant a Lancastrian, age, Vergil set conscientiously about his task, collecting memories and canvassing opinions, and his work is widely seen as marking a turning point in the writing of English history. (Keith Dockray, moreover, points out that where the civil wars are concerned, so high a percentage of the surviving records were written from a Yorkist viewpoint that Vergil serves as a useful corrective in re-creating the Lancastrian perspective.)

  ominous sign: Shakespeare in The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, 3.2, has Marguerite herself later recalling the “well forewarning wind” that, by twice beating her ship back toward France, seemed to be urging her away from the “scorpion’s nest” waiting on England’s “unkind shore.”

  chivalry: This concept, embodied in the courtly tournament and in popular literature, recurs time and again in the lives of the women of the late fifteenth century, one that served at once to elevate and to contain them. It was once a standard practice to contrast the bloody epics of the early medieval period with the later, “heroine-centred,” romances, “showing women in the courtly worlds of the later Middle Ages as the privileged and adored mistresses of all they surveyed. More recent criticism has come to make this view seem singularly naive; the romance heroine on her pedestal is, if anything, worse off than her epic prede
cessor who had at least some part to play in the thick of the fighting.” Henrietta Leyser, Medieval Women: A Social History of Women in England, 248. Many of Marguerite’s problems would come from the uncertainty of her position between these two worlds. See also the notes for the Epilogue.

  Chapter 2: “The Red Rose and the White”

  Crowland Abbey chronicles: “Crowland” will be a convenient way of referring to the important chronicles compiled at Crowland—or Croyland—Abbey in the Fens. The chronicle begun by one “Ingulph,” and giving the history of the abbey from 655, was later taken over by a series of “continuators”; the identity of the second continuator who chronicled the years from 1459 to 1486 (which, he declares, was the time of writing) is a matter of debate. The most popular candidate is John Russell, Bishop of Lincoln (Richard III’s chancellor for much of his reign, but needing now to ingratiate himself with the new king, Henry VII), or possibly, as an alternative, a member of Russell’s staff. Other candidates, however, have been suggested: from a clerk in Chancery whose writings only later found their way to the abbey to an unknown Crowland monk working from a secular source. It has often been pointed out that the second continuator, whoever he was, displays a certain animus against Richard III. Nonetheless, the more one reads the records for this period, the more a certain amount of bias comes to seem inevitable, and Crowland must rank as a very significant source.