by Hugh Bicheno
Her problem, underlined by the ignominious performance of the Scots at Carlisle, was that her hosts could not, even if they wished to do so, field an army capable of defeating the English, or even march far beyond the border. The Lancastrians could mount troublesome raids, one of which got as far as the Clifford manor of Skipton in the West Riding of Yorkshire before turning back; but without the credibility needed to rouse popular support, they were just pinpricks. With Duke Philippe of Burgundy fully committed to the Yorkists, there was only one place where she could hope to obtain the resources to recover the kingdom.
She sent her first formal embassy to France before news of Charles VII’s death arrived. She probably knew he was dying, as she also sent Somerset to the Burgundian court to make contact with Duke Philippe’s heir Charles, Count of Charolais, with whom he had formed a warm friendship during his attempt to seize Calais. To Paris she sent Lord Hungerford, recently returned from his pilgrimage and a rare example of a rat boarding a sinking ship, and Robert Whittingham. They had safe conducts from Charles VII, but Somerset did not.
When they disembarked at Le Tréport in the County of Eu, at the border of French and Burgundian territory, they were arrested and their papers seized by men sent by Louis XI, who was on his way to Reims for his coronation. Somerset was taken inland to the castle at Arques, outside Saint-Omer in Artois, whence he could as easily be handed over to Warwick’s men at Calais as to Duke Philippe. Hungerford and Whittingham were moved to Dieppe, from where they sent desperate letters to Marguerite warning her not to come to France herself, still less with the king and the prince, as Louis had disbanded the fleet his late father had assembled to wrest control of the Channel from Warwick.
Marguerite was now trapped in the web of intrigue Louis XI began to spin across Europe from the moment his father died, which was to earn him the well-deserved nickname ‘the Universal Spider’. Although there is hot competition for the title of the most devious prince of the Renaissance, Louis probably edges out the likes of the della Rovere Pope Sixtus IV and the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, who would otherwise have little secular competition. Warwick was a babe in arms by comparison with any of them.
Marguerite’s last opportunity to act as a free agent came in 1462, when Louis’ machinations very nearly provoked the hostile Anglo-Burgundian alliance he most feared. She travelled to France and her cousin agreed to prepare a fleet and an army for an invasion of England, to be led by Brézé, now conditionally back in favour. The moment passed, and she and Brézé set out with only 800 men, in an expedition Brézé had to finance himself. Their arrival at Bamburgh in October finally persuaded Edward he must lead an army himself to suppress the northern rebellion and to intimidate Scotland.
Marguerite and Brézé re-embarked with most of their men but their ships were overwhelmed by a storm. The surviving soldiers came ashore on Lindisfarne, but Marguerite and her champion made it to Berwick in an open boat. In the spring of 1463, along with her son, she took part in a raid across the border which ended with them in flight and at the mercy of strangers. A romantic legend has it that they owed their survival to the compassion of one of a band of brigands, but sadly it has no basis in fact.
Finally, leaving Henry behind at Bamburgh, in July 1463 she sailed with her son and courtiers to Flanders, where her precarious situation was described by Georges Chastellain: ‘destitute of all goods and all desolate [with] neither credence, nor money, nor goods, nor jewels to pledge… and finally she had no other provision, not even bread to eat, except from the purse of her knight Sir Pierre de la Brézé… It was a thing piteous to see, truly, this high princess so cast down and laid low in such great danger.’
Charles, Count of Charolais, took pity on her and gave her the means to travel to her father René d’Anjou’s county of Bar. With little support from René she formed a court in exile at Saint-Mihiel, now a suburb of Bar-le-Duc, and tried without success to prevent Edward agreeing treaties with France in October and, following the death of Mary of Guelders, with Scotland in December, in which they agreed to lend no assistance to each others’ enemies.
The apparently total extinction of her hopes came with the death of Brézé on 16 July 1465, while fighting for Louis XI against Burgundy. Three days earlier Henry VI had been captured in Lancashire; he was to be subjected to a humiliating parade through the streets of London with his feet tied under his horse before being imprisoned in the Tower. Of Marguerite’s pathetic court in Saint-Mihiel, John Fortescue wrote, ‘We be all in great poverty, but yet the queen sustaineth us in meat and drink. Her highness may do no more than she doth.’
No one could have done more than she did, at any time since she first stepped into the void created by her husband’s abdication of responsibility in 1450. No one could have animated him more and sustained his cause longer, but he was too great a burden to carry. It is hard to identify any moment in her life when she was blessed with unalloyed good fortune, but like all the great women of history she scorned self-pity and never saw herself as a victim. Her indomitability should be a source of inspiration to men and women alike.
*1 Bamburgh’s significance as the very heart of historic Northumbrian identity is made clear in Max Adams’ brilliant The King in the North.
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Plate Section
Appendix A
English Peerage 1440–62 by date of creation
Appendix B
English Peerage 1440–62 alphabetical
Appendix C
Archbishops and Bishops 1440–62
Appendix D
The Beauchamp Inheritance
Works Consulted
Acknowledgements
Picture credits
Index
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About Hugh Bicheno
An invitation from the publisher
Plate Section
* * *
Funerary effigy of Catherine de Valois.
Henry VI, share certain facial features with their mother.
A young Henry VIII, share certain facial features with great-grandmother.
A contemporary Flemish sketch of the young Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester.
A portrait by Jan van Eyck, c. 1431, believed by some to portray an Italian cardinal named Niccolò Albergati and by others to depict Cardinal Henry Beaufort.
Marguerite d’Anjou’s mother, Isabelle, Duchess of Lorraine by right and of Anjou by marriage.
Marguerite d’Anjou’s father, René, Duke of Anjou and Bar, Count of Provence and unsuccessful claimant to the kingdoms of Sicily, of Jerusalem
and of Aragon.
Detail of a miniature from the Shrewsbury Book, with John Talbot, 1st Earl of Shrewsbury, presenting the book to Marguerite d’Anjou. Richard, Duke of York, is the figure wearing a coronet on the far left, behind Henry VI.
A medallion of Marguerite d’Anjou by Pietro da Milano, 1464.
A medallion of Marguerite d’Anjou by Pietro da Milano, 1464.
Duke Philippe ‘the Good’ wearing the Order of the Golden Fleece. Ruler of Burgundy from 1419 until 1467, Philippe’s desertion of his English allies in 1435 tipped the balance of the Hundred Years War decisively in favour of France.
Charles VII ‘the Victorious’, king of France from 1422 to 1461. During his long reign Charles would expel the English from all of the territories they occupied in France, with the exception of Calais.
Isabella of Portugal, Duchess of Burgundy and granddaughter of John of Gaunt, wearing a headdress typical of the court clothing of the day.
The French and English courts followed the Burgundian fashion of extravagantly impractical clothing and headdresses.
Funerary monument of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, in the Collegiate C
hurch of St Mary, Warwick. His daughter Anne’s marriage to Richard Neville would bring the future ‘Kingmaker’ huge wealth, a prestigious earldom – and immense political influence.
Mourners around Richard Beauchamp’s tomb: Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, and his namesake son, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.
Mourners around Richard Beauchamp’s tomb: Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, and his namesake son, Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick.
Images illustrating the fall of Normandy as depicted in the fifteenth-century manuscript Vigiles du Roi Charles VII.
The mercenary François de Surienne takes the Breton border fortress of Fougères for the English.
Modern French artillery batters the English fortress of Château Gaillard.
Crude stone-firing bombards at the siege of Caen.
Details from panels of the St Ursula Shrine (1489) by Hans Memling. A fifteenth-century soldier wearing partial plate armour.
Another wears the reinforced canvas garment known as a brigandine.
The tomb effigy of Sir Ralph Fitzherbert in the Church of St Mary and St Barlok, Norbury, Derbyshire, is a fine example of a late fifteenth-century suit of armour.
The tomb effigy of Sir Ralph Fitzherbert in the Church of St Mary and St Barlok has been used as the basis for a modern replica.
A modern replica of a poleaxe, the principal weapon of the late-medieval man-at-arms.
An accurate re-enactment of a Wars of the Roses battle in which billmen try to hook each other’s legs.
The key element of the English way of war: direct shooting by massed longbowmen. By kind permission of Perry Miniatures (www.perry-miniatures.com).
An illustration by the battle artist Richard Caton Woodville (1856–1927) of the slaughter at the Cock Beck following the Battle of Towton in 1461.
Middleham Castle, North Yorkshire, was a stronghold of the Neville family from the late thirteenth century.
Warwick Castle fell into the hands of Richard Neville when his wife Anne Beauchamp became 16th countess of Warwick in 1449.
Kenilworth Castle, Warwickshire, a key fortress in Marguerite d’Anjou’s Midlands power base.
Ludlow Castle, Shropshire: the administrative centre of Richard of York’s holdings in Wales and the Marches.
The Micklegate Bar, York, was adorned with the heads of fallen Yorkist lords after their defeat at the Battle of Wakefield in 1460.
Appendix A
* * *
English Peerage
1440−62
By date of creation
KG = Knight of the Garter k. = killed in battle
Appendix B
* * *
English Peerage
1440−62
Alphabetical
KG = Knight of the Garter k. = killed in battle
Appendix C
* * *
Appendix D
* * *
OTHER INHERITANCES
* * *
Isabel Despenser, Richard Beauchamp’s second wife, was the sole heir of Thomas (k.1399), Earl of Gloucester, who was attainted for conspiring against Henry IV. Her mother was Constance of York, whose role in the 1415 conspiracy against Henry V is mentioned in Chapter 4. Isabel was also the sole heir of her older brother Richard, Baron Burghersh (d.1414). The only child of Isabel’s first marriage to Richard’s cousin (also Richard Beauchamp), 1st Earl of Worcester, was Elizabeth, Baroness Bergavenny by right (d.1448), who married Edward Neville (d.1476), uncle of the Kingmaker.
The Kingmaker claimed all the Beauchamp, Bergavenny, Burghersh and Despenser estates in the name of his wife. Various parts of this were strongly contested by the older two daughters of Richard Beauchamp’s first marriage, supported by their husbands, John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury and Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset.
There was a separate, deadly sub-dispute known as:
THE BERKELEY–LISLE FEUD
James Berkeley (d.1463) was heir to the title and property entailed in the male line of his uncle Thomas, 5th Baron Berkeley (see above). This was disputed by Thomas’s daughter and named heir Elizabeth Berkeley, Richard Beauchamp’s first wife. To finesse the dispute, in 1421 James was summoned to Parliament as the 1st, not the 6th Baron Berkeley.
Elizabeth held Berkeley Castle until her death in 1422, when James recovered it. In 1451 Elizabeth’s grandson John Talbot, later Viscount Lisle, took it back. James retaliated by sacking the manor house at Wotton-under-Edge owned by Lisle’s mother Margaret, wife of John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. Lisle then kidnapped Isabel Mowbray, James’s third wife, whom Margaret imprisoned in Gloucester Castle, where she died in 1452.
Following the deaths at Castillon of Margaret’s husband and son, James Berkeley married Joan Talbot, Margaret’s stepdaughter from her husband’s first marriage, whom she had raised from infancy.*1 This achieved a cessation of hostilities – until the next generation. Isabel’s and James’s son William, 2nd Baron Berkeley, was the victor of the last private battle in English history at Nibley Green in 1470, where Thomas, 2nd Viscount Lisle was killed.
The lawsuit, one of the most protracted in English legal history, dragged on until 1609.
*1 John Talbot married first Maud Neville, Baroness Furnivall by right and sister of Ralph, Earl of Westmorland, who died in 1422 giving birth to Joan. Their son John (k.1460) became 2nd Earl of Shrewsbury.
Works Consulted
* * *
Place of Publication London unless otherwise stated.
If you read only one other book, make it The Politics of Fifteenth-Century England: John Vale’s Book (Stroud, 1995) by Margaret Kekewich, Colin Richmond, Anne Sutton, Livia Visser-Fuchs and John Watts. It is an exemplary presentation of selections from a unique treasure trove of primary sources, accompanied by brilliant analytical essays. See also Simon Payling’s invaluable articles listed separately at the end of this bibliography.
Most of the printed works listed are only available in research libraries. However, anyone can access the first section below by searching for the titles online. There may well be more, but these are the ones I consulted. Also, the learned articles I consulted are listed separately and by journal for the benefit of those with access to JSTOR.
ONLINE SOURCES (PRIMARY AND SECONDARY)
Anon., The Edward IV Roll (1461?).
Anon., The Talbot Shrewsbury Book (1445).
Anon., A Chronicle of London from 1089 to 1483 (1828).
Bain, John (ed.), Calendar of Documents Relating to Scotland 1357−1509 (1988).
Brooke, Richard, Visits to the Fields of Battle in England of the Fifteenth Century (1857).
Brown, Horatio (ed.), Calendar of state papers and manuscripts relating to English affairs, existing in the archives and collections of Venice, and in other libraries of northern Italy (1864).
Burley, Peter, Michael Elliott and Harvey Watson, The Battles of St Albans (Barnsley, 2007).
Carpenter, Christine, Locality and polity: a study of Warwickshire landed society, 1401−1499 (1992).
Castor, Helen, The King, the Crown and the Duchy of Lancaster (Oxford, 2000).
Commynes, Philippe de (trans. Michael Jones), Memoirs: the reign of Louis XI, 1461−83 (1972).
Coward, Barry, The Stanleys, Lords Stanley and Earls of Derby (Manchester, 1983).
Curry, Anne, The Hundred Years’ War (2003).
Davey, John, ‘The Battle of Towton 1461 − A Re-Assessment’ (2003).
Davies, John (ed.), An English Chronicle of the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI written before the year 1471 (1856).
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004−).
Dillon, Viscount and W. Hope (eds.), Pageant of the birth, life and death of Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick (1914).
Dockray, Keith, ‘The Battle of Wakefield and the Wars of the Roses’, The Ricardian (June 1992).
Du Boulay, Francis (ed.), Documents Illustrative of Medieval Kentish Society (Ashford, 1964).
Ellis, Henry, Hall’
s Chronicle (1809, reprinted 1965).
English Heritage, Battlefield Reports: Blore Heath, Northampton, Towton (1995).
Flenley, Ralph (ed.), Six Town Chronicles of England (1911).
Fortescue, Sir John (ed. Shelley Lockwood), On the Laws and Governance of England (1997).
Gairdner, James (ed.), The Historical Collections of a Citizen of London (1876) (mainly a history of London from 1189 to 1469 known as Gregory’s Chronicle).
Gairdner, James (ed.), Three Fifteenth-Century Chronicles (1880).