Her assiduous and devoted work for the Church was acknowledged by many of the clergy. The Dowager’s obituaries recorded the high standards which she had enforced on the religious establishment of the Low Countries. One of these obituaries survived at the Charterhouse of Louvain on the memorial of Jean Bryart, a scholar and one of the executors of Margaret’s Will.100 The writer, Martin Dorpius, picked out the Dowager’s clerical appointments as being of the utmost importance for the Church. She had, he asserted, always promoted worthy and learned men regardless of their birth, she had never acceded to the nobility who demanded sinecures for their families and she had never allowed offices to be sold to the highest bidder. This was a scholar speaking, the sort of man whom Margaret had appointed to serve her as chaplains and confessors. The chronicler Molinet also recognised that her death was of the greatest significance to the religious reformers to whom she had given so generously. But he added a more personal touch in his conclusion that she would be missed as ‘a mother to orphans, a nurse to the poor and a refuge and solace for all sad grieving hearts’.101
Of her Will only a fragment has survived, but even from this remnant it is evident that the failure of her brother to pay her full dowry still weighed heavily on her mind.102 She left to Philip the 115,000 gold crowns or whatever other sum was still owing, ‘according to the treaties, letters and obligations that we have’. With her typical determination not to give up on a case, she had retained all the documents necessary to justify her claims if the opportunity arrived. Although the Duchy of Burgundy had always treated Margaret with the utmost generosity, the same could not be said of the Kingdom of England. Her trading licences were hardly an adequate compensation for the loss of the dowry.
The Will also records some of her bequests: she left 920 livres for the hospital at Louvain and 400 livres for the Grande Chartreuse in Savoy, a gesture towards her well-loved Margaret of Austria, the Duchess of Savoy. Her favourite Black Sisters of Binche were to receive a further 60 livres, and a sum of 30 livres was set aside to establish a scholarship to support a theological student at Louvain. It was this last bequest which would benefit the future Pope Adrian VI. Money was also left to the chantry at Binche for prayers to be said for the souls of her husband Charles, her stepdaughter Mary and for herself. No evidence has survived of her bequests to her family and officials and there is no mention of her many personal possessions such as her books and her paintings. The existence of a substantial number of these in the libraries and archives of Brussels and Vienna would suggest that the bulk of her goods were left to Philip the Fair and Margaret of Austria.
Her chief legacy to the Low Countries was, however, much more lasting and elusive. In all the epitaphs and obituaries of the dowager there was small reference to her political role either as an administrator during her husband’s lifetime or as an adviser to Mary, Maximilian and Philip. There is, of course, nothing unusual about the omission. Women were expected to administer their estates in the absence of their husbands, as Christine de Pisan had pointed out half a century earlier, but they were regarded merely as executives and not as policy-makers.
As a childless woman, widowed for most of her life, whose value as a symbol of the Anglo-Burgundian alliance was extinguished by the events of 1485, she might have been expected to vanish into a convent, the normal destiny for female relicts. Margaret was a relict in every sense of the word, a relict of her husband, of the Valois Duchy, of the House of York, even of her century. Within half a century of her death her milieu had passed away, transformed by the impact of the Reformation and the New World. She seemed to have become as irrelevant as the religious relics and statues which were destroyed and dispersed with her own monument.
Yet to the very end of her life, Margaret remained at the centre of the Burgundian court. In spite of catastrophic disasters she continued to live her life, adapting to changes of rulers and policies with a realism which is sometimes called ‘modern’ but which is in fact a characteristic of all survivors. Her contribution to the history of Europe was considerable. During her husband’s lifetime she acted as a unifying and mollifying influence in the northern provinces. Her support of Mary and of the Habsburg marriage was critically important in 1477. The Duchy of Burgundy survived the demise of the Valois Dukes due largely to her determination, and Louis XI’s public attacks upon her reflected her powerful influence on the policies of Burgundy. As a loyal supporter of Maximilian, she enabled him to establish the Habsburg presence in the Low Countries, and as the guide and mentor of the young Philip she saw peace and prosperity return to the Duchy. France would have to wait until the late eighteenth century before it was able to annex the Low Countries and the individuality of the modern Kingdom of Belgium owes much to its preservation from French autocracy and centralisation.
Margaret’s impact on English history was less positive. Her support of the pretenders served only to aggravate the Tudor paranoia against the House of York which led ultimately to the destruction of almost her entire family. Yet in the characters of her great-great-nieces, Mary and Elizabeth Tudor, there are many of the traits which mark the personality of Margaret herself, including a remarkable tenacity and a determination to survive. Margaret would have had great sympathy with Mary’s religious devotion, but she would surely have admired Elizabeth’s political agility more.
Epilogue
‘History is seldom quite just to historical women’ wrote Charles Kirk in his biography of Charles the Bold, yet he too paid scant attention to his hero’s third wife.1 Margaret has been particularly unfortunate in her treatment by history. She was neither a queen nor a saint and her story was not grand enough to merit a nineteenth century biography, while the twentieth century has had little time for the biographies of great ladies. Nor does her life fit tidily into the packages preferred by historians. In English history she appears merely as a pawn in Edward IV’s foreign policy and a thorn in the flesh of Henry VII. She disappears into the chasms which have been excavated between the fifteenth century and the early Tudors and between English and European history. Belgian historians have been more generous, but even here she was unfortunate to live in the neglected transitional period between the Burgundian age and the Habsburg age. She has been confused with another English Princess Margaret, who married Duke John II of Brabant in the late thirteenth century.2 In spite of this there has been a continued interest in the English Dowager and she has been the subject of one full scale biography, several monographs and one Europalia exhibition.
One aspect of this interest has been the various efforts which have been made to find her tomb. In 1937 and again in 1955, during work on the old church of the Recollects, now an exhibition centre, it was thought that some of her remains had been discovered.3 A coffin containing some female bones was found beneath the threshold of the choir in the exact location recorded by the sixteenth century scholar. However a thorough re-examination of the bones in 1970 established that they were not of the correct period.
Once more, Margaret had eluded her investigators. To a very large extent Margaret will continue to elude history. She may assert her existence in her bold autograph and in the few words which she added to her official letters. Some of her gifts and books have survived. The various possible portraits provide little more than conventional images of the great lady of the fifteenth century. There is the fashionable melancholia, the pious gloom which led the far from gloomy Olivier de La Marche to adopt as his device ‘tant a suffert La Marche’ (‘so much has La Marche borne’).4 There are also the symbols: the marguerites, the coats of arms, the devices, the initials and the white roses which were all integral to her political existence. There are, however, few signs of her vigour, determination and intelligence, which were very significant indeed for the Duchy of Burgundy and for the crown of England.
Postscript and Acknowledgements
The story of Margaret has attracted more attention in Belgium than it has in England. She is recognised as a major bibliophile and has received con
siderable attention from specialists in this field. Her interests as a collector of fine books also placed her at the forefront of printing technology. In English history however, references to Margaret are confined to a few brief appearances at the time of her marriage and the conspiracies against Henry VII. Yet her life and the events in which she took part had a wide-reaching influence on England. Apart from her participation in the reigns of Edward IV and Henry VII, her action in bringing the Habsburgs into the Netherlands had a lasting impact on relations between England and the Low Countries.
This book aims to examine Margaret’s political activity, motivation and lifestyle. It is also a study of how a woman living in the second half of the fifteenth century could ensure her personal survival and prosperity, even in the face of a series of disasters which removed all her most powerful relations and which left her as the relict of a failed alliance. Margaret was a woman who took a keen interest in all that her status and society had to offer and used her considerable talents to the advantage of others as well as for her own advancement.
The completion of this book is my tribute to the very happy years I spent in Belgium and also to all the scholars, both Belgian and British, who gave me such kindness, many of whom are cited in the Notes and Bibliography. Throughout my research I received liberal assistance in all the various archives, libraries and public record offices which I used. I am particularly thankful for the generous help from Roger Tavernier of Leuven University Library, who was a reliable source of information during all the time that I have been working on this subject. I also owe a particular debt to the British Public Libraries Lending Service and to the librarians of many small branch libraries who still made it possible for books from the British Library or from the university libraries to be available to individuals who are working at some distance from a major library.
No historian works in isolation and I am well aware of my debt to all those who have written on these themes before me, especially to Richard Vaughan whose three books on the Valois Dukes first attracted me to the fascinating world of Burgundian history, to C. A. J. Armstrong whose studies on this period are both penetrating and entertaining, and to Patricia Robins whose comprehensive thesis on Margaret’s dower is available in the University library at Brussels and in the archives at Mechelen. My thanks for advice and encouragement are also due to R. A. Griffiths, P. W. Hammond, M. A. Hicks, Rosemary Horrox, and to David Morgan of the University of London, who kindly read through the almost completed work and made many helpful comments and suggestions.
Above all I am grateful to my husband John whose encouragement and patience has sustained this study over ten years, through three house moves, and who has read and reread the emerging text. I would also like to thank my daughter Elizabeth, who was such a useful contact in Brussels during my search for the illustrations. In the last resort, however, I remain solely responsible for any remaining errors, and I hope this study will provide a springboard for future work on the subject.
Christine Weightman, 1989
Twenty years later I am pleased to see a new edition of this book which has undergone some minor revisions and a slight reordering of the chapters. Although there have been many books on the period during these two decades, our basic knowledge about the life of Margaret has not changed and therefore there have been no major changes or additions to the original text. One book which sheds additional light on Margaret’s relationship with Perkin Warbeck is Ann Wroe’s Perkin - A Story of Deception, London 2003.
Christine Weightman, 2009
Illustrations, Map & Genealogical Tables
List of Illustrations
Photographs and illustrations were supplied by or are reproduced by kind permission of those to whom they are attributed.
Cover: See no. 24.
1. Falcon and fetterlock badge. Photograph Geoffrey Wheeler.
2. Fotheringhay Church, Northamptonshire. Photograph Geoffrey Wheeler.
3. Hunsdon House, detail from sixteenth century portrait of Edward VI as Prince of Wales, by W. Scrots, Queen’s Gallery, Windsor. H.M. The Queen.
4. Baynard’s Castle, detail from engraving, View of London, by Claes Visscher, c. 1625. Photograph Geoffrey Wheeler.
5. King Edward IV, Royal Collections. H.M. The Queen.
6. Queen Elizabeth Woodville, Queens’ College, Cambridge. The President and Fellows of Queens’ College Cambridge. Photograph Geoffrey Wheeler.
7. Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers, presenting his translation of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers to King Edward IV, ms. 265f. v, Lambeth Palace Library, London. His Grace The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Trustees of Lambeth Palace Library.
8. Margaret of York, artist unknown. Inventory number R F 38.17 in the Museum of the Louvre, Paris. Les Musées Nationaux de Louvre.
9. Isabella of Portugal, by Rogier van der Weyden. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California.
10. The Coronet of Margaret of York, the Cathedral Treasury, Aachen. Photograph Geoffrey Wheeler.
11. Charles the Bold, by Rogier van der Weyden. Dahlem Staatliche Museum Berlin. Photograph Jorg Anders Berlin.
12. The Palace at Bruges from an engraving by A. Sanderus in ‘Flandria Illustrata’, 1641. Photograph R. Tavernier
13. Tommaso Portinari by Hans Memlinc. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913 (14-40-626) New York.
14. King Louis XI, J. Fouquet. Private Collection.
15. Jewelled hat of Duke Charles, engraving after a drawing by J. J. Fugger. The Historisches Museum, Basle.
16. Reliquary by G. Loyet, The Cathedral Treasury Liège.
17. The Ducal Palace at Brussels in the seventeenth Century. ACL Brussels.
18. Louis, Lord Gruuthuyse, artist unknown, Groeninge Museum, Bruges. ACL Brussels.
19. Olivier de La Marche, drawing from the Recueil d’Arras, Bibliotheque Municipal, Arras. Photograph Geoffrey Wheeler.
20. Portrait of a woman, possibly Margaret of York, artist unknown. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, New York.
21. Margaret and Charles kneeling behind St Colette and St Francis, miniature from Vie de Sainte Colette, manuscript in the Convent of the Poor Clares at Ghent. ACL Brussels.
22. Margaret of York, artist unknown. The Society of Antiquaries of London.
23. Tomb of Charles the Bold in the Church of Our Lady, Brugge. ACL Brussels.
24. Margaret performs the acts of charity from Benios Seront les Misericordieux 9296 f1 The Royal Library Brussels.
25. Mary of Burgundy as a young girl, artist unknown, Gaasbeek Castle, Belgium. ACL Brussels.
26. Emperor Maximilian I, 1519, by Albrecht Dürer, The Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
27. Margaret and Mary kneeling in the Chapel of St Anne, Registre de la Guild de Sainte Anne à Gand, in the style of the ‘Master of Mary of Burgundy’ the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. H.M. The Queen.
28. The Palace of Margaret of York at Malines, engraving R. Blokhuyse, Chorographia Sacra Brabantiae. Stadsarchief Mechelen.
29. Equestrian Seal of Mary of Burgundy, 1477, Antwerp Archives. ACL Brussels.
30. Tomb of Mary of Burgundy in the Church of Our Lady at Bruges. ACL Brussels.
31. King Richard III, artist unknows, Royal Collections. H.M. The Queen.
32. Edward IV as Hadrian kneeling before Trajan with Margaret of York beside him, miniature from ms. Roy. 19 E V. The British Library.
33. George, Duke of Clarence, artist unknown, Brocket Hall, Hertfordshire. Lord Brocket. Photograph Geoffrey Wheeler.
34. Tomb of John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk and his wife Elizabeth, Wingfield Church, Suffolk. Photograph Geoffrey Wheeler.
35. Queen Elizabeth of York, artist unknown, Royal Collections. H.M. The Queen.
36. Perkin Warbeck, drawing from the Recueil d’Arras. Bibliothèque Municipal, Arras. Photograph Geoffrey Wheeler.
37. Deposition, by a follower of Rogier van der Weyden. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Ma
libu, California.
38. Detail of Deposition.
39. The Verdict of Cambyses or The Arrest of the Unjust Judge, Gerard David, Communal Museum, Bruges. ACL Brussels.
40. Probable portrait of Margaret of Austria, Portrait of a young Princes, Master of Moulins. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 (1975-1-130) New York.
41. Philip the Fair, Archduke of Austria and Duke of Burgundy, artist unknown, Royal Collections. H.M. The Queen.
42. Joanna of Castile, Archduchess of Austria and Duchess of Burgundy, artist unknow
Royal Collections. H.M. The Queen.
43. Margaret kneeling before the Trinity, miniature in grisaille, from Traites de morale, ms. 9272-76 f. 182. The Royal Library, Brussels.
44. Reliquary presented by Margaret to St Ursmer’s Church, Binche. ACL Brussels.
45. Margaret at prayer, miniature from Benois seront les Miséricordieux studio Jean Dreux, ms 9296, f. 17. The Royal Library, Brussels.
Margaret of York: The Diabolical Duchess Page 31