Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses Page 9

  Cecily Neville’s eldest son, the “fair white rose” of York, was still only eighteen, but when, three days later, he was acclaimed and enthroned, his huge stature and glowing golden looks made him seem every inch the king. The youthful Edward with his royal bloodline not only was the favorite candidate backed by Warwick and the Neville party, but had also recently proved his mettle by leading his army to a decisive victory at Mortimer’s Cross. And it would have seemed appropriate to the Yorkists at least for his royal title—Edward IV—to have such closeness and continuity with that of the great Plantagenet progenitor, Edward III.

  The Yorkists had finally succeeded in putting one of their own on the throne, but they had not yet completely won. London was not England. On March 13, with Warwick already engaged recruiting men in the Midlands, King Edward marched his army north to a fresh fight. There was still another king alive, with Henry and Marguerite in the North still commanding the loyalty of a majority of the nobility. Prospero di Camulio, the Milanese ambassador in France, erroneously heard that Marguerite had given her husband poison, after persuading him to abdicate in favor of their son. “However,” he equivocated, “these are rumours in which I do not repose much confidence.” Very soon, however, after the dreadful battle of Towton, di Camulio was writing less cautiously.

  Fought outside York in the worst of wintry weather, on an icy Palm Sunday, Towton is still probably the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. No detailed description survives, and the numbers of those involved, as estimated by contemporary reporters and later historians, vary wildly. But what is agreed is that this was a ten-hour endurance test in which men slogged each other to exhaustion, one in which King Edward told his men to give no quarter, and one in which the opposing Lancastrians, with the wind against them, suffered snow and arrows blowing together into their faces.

  Before the battle had begun, both sides were already worn and frozen, after a bitter night spent in the biting wind. Nonetheless, the fighting went on until ten o’clock, long after it was dark. By dusk the Lancastrian forces had been driven backward to a deep gully of the River Cock, and many who were not hacked down were drowned as they tried to cross.

  It was, says the Great Chronicle of London, “a sore and long and unkindly fight—for there was the son against the father, the brother against brother.” Crowland talks of more than thirty-eight thousand dead, and though that is probably an exaggeration, “many a lady,” said Gregory’s Chronicle, lost her beloved that day.

  For others, of course, the news was good. Cecily had word of the Yorkist victory early, on April 3, as William Paston wrote: a “letter of credence” bearing Edward’s own sign “came unto our said lady this same day . . . at xi clock and was seen and read by me.” The Bishop of Elphin was, as he subsequently told the Papal Legate, actually in her house when she received the glad news. “On hearing the news the Duchess [returned] to the chapel with two chaplain and myself and there we said ‘Te Deum’ after which I told her that the time was come for writing to your Lordship, of which she approved.”

  Now it was Marguerite, her husband, and her son who were to flee, leaving York, where they waited for news, with only what they could carry. The Lancastrian army had been scattered, and the Yorkists held London. Whatever the future held in store for the family, it was sure to be brutal—all the more so given the distinct lack of public affection for Marguerite in most corners of England. As Prospero di Camulio wrote, “Any one who reflects at all upon the wretchedness of that queen and the ruins of those killed and considers the ferocity of the country, and the state of mind of the victors, should indeed, it seems to me, pray to God for the dead and not less for the living.”

  _______________

  *Women, of course, traditionally had an intercessionary or conciliatory function. Margery Paston was urged to persuade the Duchess of Norfolk to support her family, for “one word of a woman should do more than the words of twenty men.”

  PART II

  1460–1471

  7

  “TO LOVE A KING”

  Lady Grey: Why stops my lord? Shall I not hear my task?

  Edward: An easy task: ’tis but to love a king.

  HENRY VI, PART 3, 3.2

  A new regime had come in, a new ruling house held the throne, and everything had changed. But none of the protagonists could have failed to be aware that, where Fortune’s Wheel had spun once so dramatically, it could spin again just as easily.

  The fortunes of Marguerite of Anjou had turned dramatically for the worse, though it had been such a brief time since she had been graciously receiving humble petitioners. After the battle, she, with her husband and son, had fled north back to Scotland, where they would remain for the next year. The refugees were forced again to promise the perpetually contested border town of Berwick to the Scots as the price of their entertainment, while any further attempt to recruit French aid was temporarily thwarted by the death that summer of the French king, Charles. His successor, Louis, would have to be wooed afresh. Attainted in the first Parliament of November 1461 for transgressions and offenses “against her faith and Liegance” to King Edward, Marguerite was being destroyed as only a woman can be. A ballad from the time sums up the campaign against her:

  Moreover it is a right great perversion,

  A woman of a land to be a regent—

  Queen Margaret I mean, that ever hath meant

  To govern all England with might and power

  And to destroy the right line was her intent.

  The absent Marguerite was now everyone’s choice of villain. Another ballad, a couple of years later, had Henry VI lamenting he had married a wife “that was the cause of all my moan.” When the Tudor chronicler Polydore Vergil wrote later that “by mean of a woman, sprang up a new mischief that set all out of order,” he was casting her as another Eve. Even Edward, for whom the still-extant Henry should surely have been the greatest enemy, wrote of him as having been moved “by the malicious and subtle suggestion and enticing of the said malicious woman Margaret his wife.”

  Elizabeth Woodville, the freshly widowed daughter of Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford, had certainly suffered as well. She had endured the loss of her husband, John Grey, but she was also forced to confront the potential wreck of her whole family. She could no longer count on the security of a home on one of the Grey family’s Midland estates. Not only would she have to fight her dead husband’s family for her dower rights, but as leading Lancastrians the Woodvilles might well have found themselves ruined when Henry and Marguerite fell.

  Margaret Beaufort too had suffered, to a lesser degree. The armed clashes that brought the Yorkists into power killed her father-in-law, the Duke of Buckingham, at Northampton in 1460 and brought the position of his family into question, threatening the bastion of support that Margaret had enjoyed since her marriage to Henry Stafford. They had also scattered her natal family. Her cousin Henry, the latest Duke of Somerset (son to Marguerite’s ally), had to flee abroad after Towton with his younger brothers, as did Margaret’s brother-in-law Jasper Tudor. In the autumn of 1461, Jasper followed Queen Marguerite into her Scottish exile and would spend almost a decade, there and in France, trying to rally the Lancastrian cause.

  Margaret’s husband, too, had fought for the Lancastrians at Towton; he, however, had been pardoned by a King Edward determined to heal breaches insofar as possible. Henry and Margaret were able to establish themselves in the castle of Bourne in the Fen country, part of Margaret’s own Holland inheritance from her grandmother. The wardship of Margaret’s son, the young Henry Tudor, however, was another matter. He was no threat to Edward (or, rather, with Henry VI and his son both living, he was hardly the greatest threat), but he and his lands did present a financial opportunity for anyone the king wished to reward.

  Whereas Henry Tudor’s lands were given to the Duke of Clarence, wardship of the four-year-old boy was given to the devoted Yorkist Sir William Herbert, the man who had once, in Wales, taken Edmund Tudor into custody,
leaving the young Margaret Beaufort a widow. But for several years this arrangement, like Henry’s previous wardship with his uncle Jasper, seemed a comparatively happy one; Henry, visited by Margaret and her husband, was raised with every advantage as one of Herbert’s own family—which, with several young daughters to marry off, they may have planned he would one day become.

  As for Cecily Neville, it must have been hard for her to work out where Fortune’s Wheel had left her. The loss of her husband and her second son, a shattering personal grief, was only weeks behind her, but now another son, her eldest, sat on the throne, opening up a world of possibilities. As Edward set out north again, he recommended his mother to the burghers of London as his representative. The Bishop of Elphin concluded his letter about Cecily’s reception of the battlefield news by urging the Papal Legate to take advantage of the new influence of the king’s mother: “As soon as you can, write to the King, the Chancellor, and other Lords, as I see they wish it; also to the Duchess, who is partial to you, and [holds] the king at her pleasure.” In the early days of Edward IV’s reign, perhaps the bishop was not the only one to consider that Cecily could rule her son as she wished. Edward granted to her the lands held by his father and further subsidized her always lavish expenditure. She regarded herself as queen dowager, and she played the part. Edward, for his part, must have been aware that he had come to the throne by the efforts of her relations (whatever breaches between the Nevilles and the Yorkists had existed in the past, or might come later). And he was young enough to make it possible for everyone—perhaps even including his mother—to underestimate his capabilities.*

  Cecily’s sons Richard and George and her youngest daughter—fourteen-year-old Margaret “of Burgundy,” as she would become—were now installed at Greenwich, the luxurious riverside pleasure palace that had been remodeled by Henry VI’s uncle Humfrey, the Duke of Gloucester. Her two elder sisters were already established elsewhere, though both of their marriages reflected the problems women could face when their natal and their marital families wound up on different sides of the political divide. Anne, the Yorks’ eldest child, had been matched in 1445 when she was six with Henry Holland, son of the great Duke of Exeter; her husband, however, was committed to the Lancastrian cause, and by the time she reached adulthood, it seems likely the couple were estranged to the point where Anne notoriously found consolation elsewhere, with a Kent gentleman called Thomas St. Leger. The next sister, Elizabeth, had recently been married to John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk (who, as a child, had nominally been married to Margaret Beaufort). John’s father had been the great minister of Henry VI (and great friend to Marguerite), murdered in 1450; his mother, the duchess, was the mighty Alice Chaucer, a natural Lancastrian who, despite her ties to the new king’s enemies, doubtless found her son’s marriage to the new Yorkist princess to be for her family’s safety. Elizabeth quickly began to produce a string of children—at least five sons and four daughters—and with her husband converted to the Yorkist side, Elizabeth’s future looked uncontroversial, the more so since John showed no aptitude for nor interest in active political office. But his new sister-in-law Margaret, while a mere two years younger than Elizabeth, was, crucially, still unmarried when her brother Edward came to the throne—and her single status now became one more card for the new king to play.

  Greenwich had once, under the so recent former regime, been adopted by Queen Marguerite as her own. Marguerite had decorated it with the daisy emblem (and new windows, a Great Chamber, an arbor in the gardens, and a gallery overlooking them) that was now fitting also for this other Margaret. The whole family would come to use Greenwich a good deal, but for the moment, Edward seized on it primarily as a suitable and healthy residence for his three youngest siblings, and those bonds between Margaret and her brothers Richard and George, which this proximity may have fostered, would play an important part in English affairs throughout the Tudor reign.

  Here Margaret would have continued her education. A well-to-do girl’s training usually centered on the religious and on the practical: reading, in case she had to take over business responsibilities; some knowledge of arithmetic; and an understanding of household and estate management that might even extend to a little property law. The technical skill of writing was rarer; even Margaret’s own later signature was rough and unformed. And though a girl might be expected to read the psalms in Latin from an early age, to write Latin, by contrast, was so unusual that even the learned Margaret Beaufort, says her confessor, John Fisher, had later to regret she had not been taught.

  But perhaps this York Margaret benefited to some degree from being brought up with her brothers and their tutors. In later life, her own books would be in French—a language she obviously was taught—but by then her collection of books (at least twenty-five of them, an impressive collection for a woman), and her habit of giving and getting books as gifts, shows notable literary interest. Printer William Caxton would later—tactfully, but presumably also truly—acknowledge her help in correcting his written English. Under her auspices, he published the first book ever printed in English, a translation from French of the tales of Troy, and wrote of how she had “found a defaut in my English which she commanded me to amend.”

  Those books Margaret later owned would be wonderfully illustrated in the lively modern style with flowers and fruit, animals and birds. Perhaps she got a full measure of enjoyment out of the gardens at Greenwich, but perhaps, too, the spirit of Duke Humfrey, a famed bibliophile, lingered on in the palace.

  Margaret’s pronounced interest in religion may have come from her mother, but although in her later life she would give particular support to those orders of religion that devoted themselves to practical good works, and had as ardent a passion for relics of the saints as any other medieval lady, she seems also to have boasted a more intellectual interest in the subject than Cecily Neville. If there was to be a darker, an almost hysterical, element in her religious faith, then perhaps it shows only that the travails of her family, at her most impressionable age, had not left her untouched.

  Margaret’s young relation Anne Neville, meanwhile, also found herself in a radically new position within Edward’s England. Anne Neville’s father, Warwick, Cecily Neville’s nephew and cousin to the new king, was now the man most thought to be the real power behind the throne, though in fact there is much to suggest that Edward would be (from Warwick’s viewpoint) finding his own feet much too quickly; the commons “love and adore [Edward] as if he were their god,” wrote one Italian observer. But all the same, Warwick, having helped the new king to his throne, was riding high, restless and busy. The whereabouts of his daughters and wife, the countess Anne Beauchamp, are not often known for sure, though it is likely they visited the great northern stronghold of Middleham and the royal court. The countess’s own family estates in the West Midlands are one possibility for their main base; a countess had her own household, as distinct from her husband the earl’s, but events in this female-led world were not recorded as extensively.

  Not that Anne Neville’s world was always female. Edward’s younger brother Richard was brought up in Warwick’s household for three years, and in 1465 he and Anne were recorded as being at the feast to celebrate the enthronement of Anne’s uncle George Neville as archbishop of York. By this point it would have been evident that the nine-year-old Anne would be a significant heiress, whether or not the thirteen-year-old Richard was mature enough to take note. The continental chronicler Waurin would record that even now, Warwick contemplated marrying his daughters to the king’s two brothers.

  Marriage was in the air, and not just for Edward’s brothers. Cecily Neville was about to find out the truth behind the later adage “Your daughter’s your daughter all of your life—your son’s your son till he gets him a wife.” And the young King Edward was about to make a choice based (most unusually for the times) on “blind affection,” as Polydore Vergil describes it disapprovingly—a choice that would shape the future of his kingdom.

>   The story of how the widowed Elizabeth Woodville had originally met Edward IV is one of the best known from history. And it is just that—a story. No one knows much about Elizabeth’s life before she made her royal match because no one was watching. Where fact was absent, fiction rushed in.

  The sixteenth-century writer Edward Hall had Edward IV hunting in the forest of Wychwood near Grafton and coming to the Woodville home for refreshment. Other traditions say it was Whittlebury Forest, where an oak was long celebrated for the theory that Elizabeth—and the pleading figures of the two little boys she had borne her dead husband—stood under it to catch the king’s attention as he rode by, so that she could petition to be granted the lands owed to her under the terms of her dowry. Either way, Elizabeth, Hall said, “found such grace in the King’s eyes that he not only favoured her suit, but much more fantasised her person. . . . For she was a woman . . . of such beauty and favour that with her sober demeanour, lovely looking and feminine smiling (neither too wanton nor too humble) beside her tongue so eloquent and her wit so pregnant . . . she allured and made subject to her the heart of so great a king.”

  After Edward, Hall said, “had well considered all the lineaments of her body and the wise and womanly demeanour that he saw in her,” he tried to bribe her into becoming his mistress (under the more flattering courtly appellation of his “sovereign lady”) in the hopes of her later becoming his wife. She answered that “as she was unfitted for his honour to be his wife then for her own honesty she was too good to be his concubine”—an answer that so inflamed the king to a “hot burning fire” he determined indeed to marry her. The same technique, of course, worked again when Anne Boleyn practiced it on Elizabeth’s grandson Henry, whose likeness to Edward has been much remarked.