Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses Page 39

  his force met Warwick’s at Barnet: The reports of the battle serve as a good example of how news spread: The battle of Barnet started at dawn twelve miles outside London; wild rumors were abroad early, and by ten the city was hearing tales of Edward’s victory, but these were disbelieved until, the Great Chronicle of London says, a rider raced through the streets displaying one of Edward’s own gauntlets, sent as a token to his queen. A Norfolk man claimed to have seen the bodies of Warwick and Montague at St. Paul’s that morning. Wanting to be the first to deliver the news back home, he took a boat after dinner, about noon, but was captured at sea by merchants of the Hanseatic League and carried to Zealand, where his story was quickly taken to Margaret of Burgundy at Ghent. Margaret wrote a letter describing it to her mother-in-law and presumably also to her husband—who, however, was also getting erroneous news that Edward IV had been killed.

  “womanly behaviour and the great constance”: Agnes Strickland’s early-Victorian Lives of the Queens of England wrote that Elizabeth’s “feminine helplessness” had produced a “tender regard” for her throughout the realm, in contrast to the effect produced by the “indomitable spirit” of Marguerite of Anjou. We might now phrase the comparison differently, but contemporaries clearly agreed.

  PART III: 1471–1483

  Chapter 11: “My Lovely Queen”

  Cecily . . . “sore moved” Sir John to sell her the place: Helen Castor, Blood and Roses: The Paston Family and the Wars of the Roses, 119. She had, after all, grown up in far less commodious establishments: Raby was a palace-cum-fortress rebuilt almost a century before, with towers and apartments irregularly grouped around courtyards.

  disguised as a kitchen maid: If that sounds too much like Cinderella in the fairy story, we should remember not only that Marguerite is supposed to have traveled disguised as a servant, but that in the turmoils of the 1440s Alice Chaucer had had to go to Norwich disguised “like a housewife of the country.”

  the dispensation failed to arrive: Anne’s biographer Michael Hicks (Anne Neville: Queen to Richard III, 143ff.) has written on the invalidity of the dispensation and therefore of the marriage, clearly not a subject of debate at the time, but casting an interesting light on Richard’s attitudes.

  any other choices: Hicks, for example (ibid., 111), though without citing actual evidence, portrays it as her own decision to marry Richard.

  George Buck: Sir George Buck (1560–1622), James I’s master of the revels and Richard III’s first determined apologist. His History of King Richard the Third was edited by A. N. Kincaid for Sutton in 1979. Buck’s account plays a significant part in the history of the next reign (see Chapters 16 and 18) at which time it will, however, become clear that information from this source must be treated warily.

  a declaration of trust: Cecily, by contrast, spent the summer well away from the seat of power. A letter from Margaret Paston to her son John describes how “my Lady of Yorke and all her household is [sic] still here at St Bennet’s [an abbey near the Paston home of Mautby in Norfolk] and purposed to abide there still, till the king come from be yonder the sea, and longer if she likes the air there.” The Paston Letters, 5:236. The Paston Letters contain a number of references to Cecily; see, for example, 3:110, 233, 266.

  Chapter 12: “Fortune’s Womb”

  the reburial . . . at Fotheringhay: Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, The Reburial of Richard, Duke of York, 21–30 July 1476.

  simply watched the ceremony: Sutton and Visser-Fuchs (ibid.) say Cecily was certainly conspicuous “for her absence, or for the failure of the texts to refer to her.” They speculate that it is possible: “Her status as the widow of a man who was being buried almost as a king may have created problems of precedence that were best resolved by her merely watching,” suggesting alternatively that she may have been absent from sickness “or choice.”

  Elizabeth Stonor writes: Anne Crawford, Letters of Medieval Women, 75–77; Stonor Letters, 269–271.

  letter of Cecily’s perhaps written in 1474: Crawford, Letters of Medieval Women, 133–134. For the possible significance of Syon in the family dynamics, and the shared piety here reflected as a bond between Richard and Cecily, see Michael K. Jones, Bosworth, 1485: Psychology of a Battle, 78. Anne Crawford, Yorkists: The History of a Dynasty, 66, however, sees Edward IV’s later decision to call one of his youngest daughters Bridget, “a name almost unknown in England,” as a reflection of Cecily’s devotion to Saint Bridget of Sweden and the Bridgettine abbey of Syon.

  Cecily’s daughter Elizabeth . . . access of independence: The Paston letters suggest that John was perhaps dominated by his mother, Alice, as possibly, at least in her younger years, was Elizabeth herself, who in any case would have been fairly well occupied with her childbearing. In 1468 the Pastons reported that Queen Elizabeth had been persuaded to write to “my lady of Norfolk and another letter unto my lady of Suffolk the elder”—Alice. It is noticeable that the Pastons first found it worth petitioning Elizabeth herself, to intercede in a land dispute, right after Alice’s death in 1475. But Elizabeth’s awareness of the need for status and finery continued to be at war with her and her husband’s comparatively low financial standing. Present when Edward made one of his few gestures to education, at Oxford in 1481, she could be found writing (in, most unusually for any fifteenth-century noblewoman, her own hand) to John Paston, asking if she might have the use of his rooms at Windsor. “For God’s sake, say me not nay.”

  Chapter 13: Mother of Griefs

  the ever-troublesome Scots: Edward had the option of other marital plans as a peaceable way of dealing with those same Scots: a letter of 1477 to his ambassador in Scotland replies to the Scots king’s suggestions that Clarence and his sister Margaret should marry a sister and brother of his own, with Edward pleading that both were still in their period of “doule,” or mourning, and that until they were out of it he would not be able to “feel their dispositions.” It is, however, again a moot point whether he would have wished thus to advance his dangerous brother.

  daughter to the great Earl of Shrewsbury: Eleanor Butler was also, through her mother, niece by marriage to Warwick, and Shakespeare only echoes other sources in having Warwick cast up against Edward, “th’ abuse done to my niece” (Henry VI, Part 3, 3.3), speaking also of the difficulty of this king’s being “contented by one wife” (ibid., 4.3).

  Thomas More . . . muddied the waters: More also has Cecily, at the time of Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage to Edward and “under pretence of her duty towards God,” sending for Elizabeth Lucy and putting considerable, though ultimately unavailing, pressure on the unfortunate Elizabeth Lucy to stake her prior claim. The idea of precontract was a regular trope: the Mirror for Magistrates of 1559 would suggest that Humfrey, the old Duke of Gloucester, had attempted to disrupt Marguerite of Anjou’s marriage on the grounds that Henry VI was precontracted to another lady.

  loyalty to the family: Michael K. Jones, whose theory this is, writes in Bosworth, 1485: Psychology of a Battle, 35, of “a far more collective sense of identity held by medieval society. . . . As custodians of an historical pedigree, a family would together determine where the interests of its lineage lay and act to defend it.”

  good ladyship: Both letters are in Anne Crawford, Letters of the Queens of England, 142–143. See also Anne Crawford, Letters of Medieval Women, 238, for Cecily’s exercise of influence.

  [Cecily] can be glimpsed: See, for example, Calendar of Patent Rolls: Edward IV, 1461–67, 89, 151; and Calendar of Patent Rolls: Edward IV and V and Richard III, 218, 441, 459, 522. See also Calendar of Papal Registers, vol. 13, pt. 1, 106, 260.

  A few years later: English Historical Documents, 4:837 (from A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household, edited by J. Nichols [1790]), a record believed to have been made sometime around 1485, which leaves it open to interpretation whether the events that first pushed Cecily to a religious retirement (if that was indeed the sequence of events) were th
ose of 1478, 1483, or 1485 itself. It is the dwindling trace of her presence at court that inclines me to the earlier date.

  Cecily had chosen . . . the mixed life: See C. A. J. Armstrong, “The Piety of Cicely [sic], Duchess of York, a Study in Late Medieval Culture.” See also Jonathan Hughes, The Religious Life of Richard III: Piety and Prayer in the North of England; and Joanna L. Laynesmith, “The King’s Mother: Cecily Neville.”

  great female mystics: Matilda had been a nobly born nun in thirteenth-century Germany whose visions, recorded by her companions, were translated into English as the book of Saint Maud, or The Book of Ghostly Grace. (Cecily’s son Richard and his wife, Anne, also owned a copy.) The Revelations of Saint Bridget, a fourteenth-century Swedish princess who founded the Bridgettine order, was very influential in England—not least in the institution of Syon, with which Cecily had connections—as a great double foundation for men and women living under the Augustinian rule reformed by Saint Bridget. Saint Catherine of Siena was widely celebrated for her mystical marriage with Jesus and for the zest with which she set aside the trappings of a woman’s worldly life, cutting off her hair and fasting to a degree that seemed excessive even to the most devout among her contemporaries—the latter a phenomenon that has been called anorexia mirabilis, tellingly.

  Chapter 14: “A Golden Sorrow”

  She also had the encounter painted: This work and a number of others mentioned, including the Shrewsbury Book and the Beaufort Hours, were gathered together in a British Library exhibition in 2011–2012. See the catalog by Scot McKendrick, John Lowden, and Kathleen Doyle, Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination.

  their mother too was a patron of Caxton’s: Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin, and Michael Jones (The Women of the Cousins’ War: The Duchess, the Queen, and the King’s Mother, 135) suggest she may be the noble lady who, in the interests of her daughters’ moral education, commissioned from Caxton a translation of the manual for young ladies called The Book of the Knight of the Tower.

  with a grant to the king’s mother: Calendar of Patent Rolls: Edward IV and V and Richard III, 441. See also Calendar of Papal Registers, vol. 13, pt. 1, 106, 260.

  her Victorian biographer Mary Ann Hookham: Hookham (The Life and Times of Margaret of Anjou) also quotes the local historian of the nineteenth century J. F. Bodin: “Her blood, corrupted by so many sombre emotions, became like a poison, which infected all the parts that it should nourish; her skin dried up, until it crumbled away in dust; her stomach contracted, and her eyes, as hollow and sunken as if they had been driven into her head, lost all the fire, which had, for so long a time, served to interpret the lofty sentiments of her soul.”

  PART IV: 1483–1485

  Chapter 15: “Weeping Queens”

  his wishes no longer paramount: This begs the question of whether deathbed codicils to Edward’s will (mentioned by both Crowland and Mancini but, if made, since lost) had in any case removed the powers formerly given to her.

  even female: The hint of Richard’s double prescience—both as to Edward V’s fate and as to Elizabeth of York’s future importance—cannot necessarily this time be put down to hindsight, since Mancini’s narrative ended, with his visit, in the summer of 1483.

  confided to his wife: Anne’s role in events is one of the great imponderables. Shakespeare, in The Tragedy of Richard III, 4.1, would have a scene of mutual lamentation when the three women—Elizabeth Woodville, Anne Neville, and Cecily—get the first inkling of Richard’s plans. But there is no reason to assume this was the reality (it certainly failed to reflect the dissent between Elizabeth and her mother-in-law). Janis Lull, introducing the Cambridge University Press edition of the play, notes that the triad has been compared to the lamentations of Helena, Andromache, and Hecuba in Seneca’s Troades and explores also the motif of the three Marys—Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome, and Mary the mother of James—in the medieval Resurrection plays.

  already an ally of Margaret Beaufort’s: Morton had been one of the protectors involved in the negotiation of Margaret Beaufort’s marriage settlements, as well as mediator to Edward IV in her attempt to get her son home.

  On June 16 the council sent a delegation: Some sources, Mancini, Vergil, and More among them, seem to suggest that the younger boy was surrendered before Hastings’s execution; however, the dispassionate evidence of a contemporary letter and an account book suggests the sequence of events followed here.

  “womanish frowardness”: Elizabeth had, Buckingham said, no need to fear, since there was “no man here that will be at war with women,” and as for the rights of sanctuary: “What if a man’s wife will take sanctuary because she list to run away from her husband? I would ween if she can allege no other cause, he may lawfully, without any displeasure to St Peter, take her out of St Peter’s church by the arm.”

  More’s pages have . . . to be decoded: See notes for Chapter 4.

  Another theory: See that of Michael K. Jones in Bosworth, 1485: Psychology of a Battle: “The painful turmoil of 1469 was to be mirrored in 1483, as Richard succeeded where Clarence had failed. And as King Richard struggled to overcome the threats from those who opposed this new Yorkist settlement, it was Cecily to whom he appealed for daily blessing in his enterprise. Her role was crucial.” See chapter 4, “The Search for Redemption.” It is Jones who cites as evidence the archbishop’s register: Registrum Thome Bourgchier, Cantanuariensis Archiepiscopi, AD 1454–1486, edited by F. R. H. DuBoulay (Canterbury and York Society, liv, 1957), 52–53. Michael K. Jones also states (Bosworth, 91) that several decades later, in 1535, a conversation between the Spanish ambassador Chapuys and Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell showed Cecily had made a written confession. The actual statement from Chapuys (Calendar of State Papers Foreign and Domestic: Henry VIII, 8:281) is that he had told Cromwell that Henry, in seeking a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, was wrong to rely on the statutes of the realm, “which only depended on the prince’s wish, as might be seen by the Acts of King Richard, who . . . caused King Edward himself to be declared a bastard, and to prove it, called his own mother to bear witness, and caused it to be continually preached so.” From this Jones concludes that Cecily did indeed bear written evidence, that she did so before Shaa preached his sermon, and that she was in London to do it. But this may apportion more weight than Chapuys’s statement can really bear. Joanna Laynesmith in her article “The King’s Mother: Cecily Neville” for the Ricardian of autumn 2005 suggests as her own suspicion that Cecily “did not actively promote Richard’s accession, but equally did not oppose it either.” I would be inclined to agree.

  The right of inheritance to the throne: Even a hundred years later, when Elizabeth I was dying, there was, to quote the succession historian Howard Nenner, no agreement as to how the next ruler should be chosen, let alone as to whom he or she should be. No one knew “whether the crown ought to pass automatically at the death of Elizabeth to the next in the hereditary line; whether the next in the hereditary line might be passed over because of a ‘legal’ incapacity to rule; whether the next monarch ought to be determined in parliament; or whether the queen should be exhorted in the waning days of her life to nominate her own successor.” Nenner, The Right to Be King: The Succession to the Crown of England, 1604–1714, 13.

  the grant of [Cecily’s] manors and lands: Calendar of Patent Rolls: Edward IV and V and Richard III, 459.

  Chapter 16: “Innocent Blood”

  The list of accounts: Anne Sutton and P. W. Hammond, eds., The Coronation of Richard III: The Extant Documents.

  young Edward had been left in the North: The fact that some documents (believed to have been prepared in advance) describe him as present on his parents’ coronation day suggests that he might have been expected.

  Elizabeth Woodville . . . was “so well pleased”: A phrase from Crowland is often cited that might seem to suggest Elizabeth had taken a very active and early part in the plotting: that “many things were going on in secret . . . especially on the part of those
who had availed themselves of the privilege of sanctuary.” But a fuller quotation describes specifically the people “of the South and of the West” of the kingdom, “especially those people who, because of fear, were scattered without franchises and sanctuaries.”

  Margaret was on the point of sending . . . Christopher Urswick: In the end, another messenger would be sent to Brittany, with “a good great sum of money” raised by Margaret in the City. This next messenger, interestingly, was a man, Hugh Conway, with connections not only to Edward IV’s household but also to the Stanleys.

  a favorite outside candidate for villain: If the Duke of Buckingham had had the boys killed then (as Buckingham would surely have calculated), Richard might indeed have hesitated at least in the short term to publish the deaths, though one must still ask, why did he not do so later? Henry VII, when the time came, might well have kept a similar silence. If this was true, the guilty man, after all, was nominally one of Henry’s supporters—one of his mother’s close allies.

  historians from Vergil and More onward: This is true unless we agree with the suggestion that More broke off his history at the crucial point because he could no longer subscribe to what he had become convinced was a lie.

  Margaret Beaufort herself: See Helen Maurer’s article “Whodunit: The Suspects in the Case” for an analysis of the evidence for the different candidates mooted (who in fact include even the boy’s mother, Elizabeth Woodville). Margaret Beaufort is her personal favorite for the role.

  not indifferent to the boys’ fate: There was a mounting body of rumor. Weinreich’s Danzig Chronicle of 1483 claimed that “later this summer Richard the king’s brother seized power and had his brother’s children killed, and the queen secretly put away.” French chancellor Guillaume de Rochefort, in a speech to the Estates-General on January 15, 1484, warned the French (faced with their own minority rule): “Look what has happened in [England] since the death of King Edward: how his children, already big and courageous, have been put to death with impunity, and the royal crown transferred to their murderer by the favour of the people.” Not everyone, however, had Richard as the sole culprit. The Historical Notes of a London Citizen declared that “King Edward the Vth, late called Prince of Wales and Richard Duke of York, his brother . . . were put to death in the Tower of London by the vise [advice] of the Duke of Buckingham.” This last comforting theory—that the blame belonged to Buckingham—may have been the one to which Margaret of Burgundy persuaded herself to subscribe. Of the chroniclers associated with Burgundy, Molinet blamed Richard, but Commynes put at least part of the guilt on Buckingham. She may, alternatively, have assumed any rumors of murder were exaggerated.