The Women of the Cousins’ War

by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin

  Historians, overawed by Katherine’s piety, cannot bring themselves to believe that she would have had sex and then denied it. Instead, they argue that she was a virgin, inexplicably refusing sex with a handsome young husband to whom she had been betrothed from the age of four. They have to believe that she defied everyone by refusing to consummate a vitally important marriage, as arranged by her parents and blessed by the Pope, after the young couple had been publicly commended to be fruitful, and put into bed together. And also that nobody at the time – not the Spanish ambassador, nor the churchmen, nor the duennas – observed that the new Princess of Wales was refusing her husband his legal marital rights and so jeopardising the alliance between England and Spain which was the reason for the marriage.

  WOMEN EXCLUDED FROM HISTORY

  Whether a woman is being regarded as Eve the temptress or Mary the Virgin, this is still to view her in relation to her sexual activity with men, and this is private activity, not a public or historical act. Women were not seen as having a public nature; they were not often observed performing visible, significant and historical acts. When a woman broke this taboo and was clearly involved in public acts, the medieval historians of her time were forced to see her as a stereotype or – at the worst – hardly a woman at all. If she was neither Eve nor Mary, then she must be a man. So too the playwrights:

  LADY MACBETH: The raven himself is hoarse

  That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan

  Under my battlements. Come, you spirits

  That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

  And fill me from the crown to the toe topful

  Of direst cruelty!

  Traditional historians do not look for energetic, effective women; and when they cannot blind themselves to the vibrant presence of such a woman, rather than amend their views of women, they define her instead as so exceptional as to be a pseudo-man.

  One of the early written histories of England, commissioned by Henry VII, father to Henry VIII, written in Latin by Polydore Vergil sometime from 1507, describes the reigns of Henry VI and Edward IV but has more to say about a woman – Margaret of Anjou – than about any other character of the times. Vergil’s difficulty in describing her is that her reality challenges this view of woman’s passive private nature. For him, as for so many historians who came after him, a woman cannot be a historical figure. If she acts powerfully, she is really a man: ‘A woman of sufficient forecast, very desirous of renown, full of policy, council, comely behaviour, and all manly qualities . . .’

  This is the start of the interrogation of Margaret of Anjou’s femininity that has gone on until our own times. In a very little while this queen who fought so courageously for her son, her husband and her House would become not even a man but a beast, a ‘she-wolf’:

  She-wolf of France, but worse than wolves of France . . .

  Women are soft, mild, pitiful, and flexible;

  Thou stern, obdurate, flinty, rough, remorseless

  Many historians in the past 600 years had difficulty in describing women making history, taking events into their own hands and being agents of change, because they simply could not believe that it could be done. If it was done, then it must have been done by someone who was in some way male. Amazingly, this view of women was not left in the medieval period: ‘The coverage of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, for example, has been notable for its emphasis on her appearance, with endless scathing comments on her unwomanly ambition and her coldly tenacious style.’

  The UK’s first woman prime minister attracted the same unease in 1988: ‘In criticizing Mrs Thatcher as a surrogate man, feminists mean she has betrayed women – not only politically but spiritually. Antifeminists mutter the same thing. She is abhorrent, anathema, unfeminine. She is herself destroying what is most precious and treasured about womanhood in pursuit of mere manly power.’

  Women were not only missing from history because of the blinkered vision of male historians, they were excluded because of the tradition of the historical record. Before history started to research the stories of social minorities, the lower classes, the excluded, the less visible, it had always focused on the documented decisions and doings of the great people – almost always men. Since women of the pre-modern world were excluded from public life, they were not likely to perform major public acts that would have entered the record books. Since women were banned from political power almost everywhere in the world until they won the right to vote, mostly in the first half of the twentieth century, they are bound to be absent from any political history. Since they were banned from combat, or segregated into women’s services in the UK until the 1990s, they are mostly absent from military history. Forced to hand over land or any wealth to a husband on marriage until 1870 in the UK, there are few women entrepreneurs or capitalists in the histories of farming or industry. Barred from gaining degrees at Oxford and Cambridge until – incredibly – the late 1920s, educated in separate colleges in the USA, potential women scientists, doctors, mathematicians, literary and social critics were not educated and so are absent from the magisterial nineteenth-century records of pioneers and experts. As late as the 1960s, professional and graduate schools in America imposed a quota that there should be no more than 10 per cent of women on their courses. Since women were not allowed to earn, study or train, how could they ever become notable? How could they ever get into the historical record for their achievements? Why would anyone ever remember them?

  The 1895 editors of a history of law praise the ‘sure instinct’ of the law in excluding women: ‘On the whole we may say that, though it has no formulated theory about the position of women, a sure instinct has already guided the law to a general rule which will endure until our own time. As regards private rights women are on the same level as men, though postponed in the canons of inheritance; but public functions they have none. In the camp, at the council board, on the bench, in the jury box, there is no place for them.’

  ‘There is no place for them’ – how that echoes down the years! Instinctively – not thoughtfully – the law knew that women should be excluded. And so it is done, and not just in the law. In the fine arts women were present as models but not as artists: in 2007, women artists had created 2 per cent of the pictures of the National Gallery in London, but women’s faces, and their bodies – often naked – are everywhere on the walls. Women’s bodies are clearly art, of interest to the museums; but their vision is not. Again, this is because women were effectively banned from training. The Royal Academy schools in the UK only admitted women from 1861, and then they were not allowed to draw nudes. Only in the twentieth century did most schools allow women artists to study in life classes, and look at the naked body.

  Female musicians were also discouraged. Although Abraham Mendelssohn trained his talented daughter Fanny, he compared her with her brother: ‘Perhaps for Felix music will become a profession, while for you it will always remain but an ornament; never can and should it become the foundation of your existence.’

  Almost all great orchestras banned women performers until 1912 when four women joined the New Queen’s Hall Orchestra, London. Progress has not been swift. The Vienna Philharmonic only decided to accept women as full members in 1997, and by 2008 had recruited one: a harpist.

  Women could not hope to succeed in any art when they were banned from education and training, when they could not earn or inherit money to purchase fine-art equipment or musical instruments. They lacked the networks and support of colleagues; they were especially vulnerable to physical and sexual abuse. Like all young artists they needed a patron or senior mentor and this was an especially difficult relationship for a young woman to manage.

  There were many heartening exceptions to this general exclusion of women from the arts and the sciences. Gifted women taught themselves, working quite alone, unaware that they were actually part of a tradition of lone female scholars. Generous men shared their education: mentored female scholars, or educated their daughters.
Women used the patriarchal Church to finance and protect their studies. Powerful women stepped into positions of leadership; clever women found ways to make and keep a fortune from their husbands. In the arts and in the sciences, in the Church and in the world, exceptional women in exceptional circumstances managed to win the expensive and exclusive training, equipment, time and opportunity to practise their art, craft or science, and thus achieve the level of skill needed to create a work so good that later critics would overcome their own prejudices and rank it alongside male achievements. Of course they were very few. Virginia Woolf suggested that no woman could effectively write unless she had an annuity and a room of her own. Hers was a bleak assessment; but she was right: it is almost impossible to complete great work isolated from one’s peers, without income, without space, without equipment and without training.

  But there is another sense in which women were barred from history. They were excluded as the producers of history, as writers. They failed to become historians. When we read ‘well-behaved women don’t make history’ we must understand that not only were women barred from acting on events, denied the recognition they deserved, and explained away; they were also barred from recording events. Women are not in the record and they were not allowed to write the record. In this dual sense, history has always been made by men.

  Why this should be, is quite transparent. It is no mystery. History is written or commissioned by victorious men to tell their own version of their lives. One of the spoils of victory is to be the one who tells the story. Defeated men, such as Richard III, lost both the battle and the telling of the history. The story will be that of a triumphant male, in which women (if they appear at all) are either his supporters or his victims. The victors of events prior to our own century are almost always male. As late as 1961 E.H. Carr’s definitive musing on the nature of history referred consistently and exclusively to male historians and only to male historical figures: ‘The knowledge of the historian is not his exclusive personal possession: men, probably, of many generations and of many countries have participated in accumulating it. The men whose actions the historian studies were not isolated individuals acting in a vacuum: they acted in a context . . .’

  Every scholarly history that was written before 1920 was written by a man who had been taught by a man, whose thesis would be examined by a man, and whose book would be published by a male publisher, and reviewed by a male critic. This could not change until women were admitted to universities and colleges. When women could train as historians in the universities, they could for the first time research, write and publish scholarly history. The arrival of professionally trained women historians became a driving part of the new scholarship of history that looked for the first time at the minorities, at the marginalised, at the persecuted and at the working class. Women historians joined with left-wing and labour historians in opening up archives with questions about the lives of those that history had previously overlooked. When women started to write history they took an interest in women’s history and started to discover the women whose stories had been neglected, and they started to analyse the traditional history and offer an alternative to the male stereotyped views of women. They were part of a rise of historians questioning the accepted views and the canon of traditional history who critically examined issues of bias in gender, race, culture and nationality.

  From the late 1950s we see the rise of women’s studies, created by the new generation of women graduates. We see the publishing of realistic and fair histories of women written by women historians who were actively seeking evidence, and – when they found it – describing it, not explaining it away. We see research into early female artists and musicians, scientists and mathematicians. Now you can search in any library, or look in any university or local-history group and find that this pioneering work has become mainstream. Women are becoming so well established in the historical record, both as historians and as subjects, that their very struggle is being forgotten.

  When women are allowed to study and become historians they bring a more realistic view to the subject. Individual women, working as historians, know the range of their own experiences and capabilities and thus know what other women can do and be. Women who know themselves, know that their gender is not especially or exclusively saintly. They know it is not especially promiscuous or especially wicked. Women know that they are neither Eve nor Our Lady. Once women start to write about women a new realism creeps into the writing, and – as you see from the two co-authors of this book about women – this realism is shared by men.

  THREE WOMEN OF THE COUSINS’ WAR

  This book is part of the ongoing process of seeking and describing women in history. It examines the three women who were the heroines of the first three novels in the series I have called ‘The Cousins’ War’. This was the name given at the time to the series of battles and skirmishes which later historians would call the Wars of the Roses. But the name ‘the cousins’ war’ is the name that was used at the time and it describes the family nature of the conflict: an armed quarrel between brothers and then their sons – the cousins – over which descendant of Edward III should become King of England. It has been military history and political history which have dominated the accounts of these times, and since few women fought, and since no woman had any political rights, it is not surprising that their lives and experiences were ignored by most historians. But the three historians in this book have chosen to look at three women of the time and have uncovered extraordinary stories of networking, conspiracy, influence, power-grabbing and self-sacrificial courage which mean that we have to adjust our view of the times and include these women as effective actors on the historical stage.

  The first character in the book is Jacquetta Duchess of Bedford, whose full biography has not yet been written. I started to study her for my novel The Lady of the Rivers and found an absence where a biography should be. Though she was a duchess of England, the mother of a queen, and the leading light in the court of Lancaster and then of York, nobody had thought to research Jacquetta.

  There are gaps in her history that perhaps later scholars will study. We know next to nothing about her private life with her husband Sir Richard Woodville. We glimpse her in the historical record only when he serves as a military commander for the House of Lancaster, and when she serves as the primary lady-in-waiting to Margaret Anjou. We know only approximate dates of her confinements, especially those babies who may have died young: the account I give here is from my own research and from lengthy discussions with David Baldwin; it is not definitive. We are more sure about the deaths of her adult children than their birth dates because the adults later became siblings to the Queen of England and entered the historical record.

  I think I can speculate with some confidence about some aspects of Jacquetta. I think she was loyal: for she served the House of Lancaster and Margaret of Anjou until the final defeat at Towton, when Margaret fled from the battle. I am sure she was passionate: for she married for love and paid a high price to do so. I know she was something of a scholar: for she kept the library inherited from her first husband; she raised a son who was a poet, a writer and an editor. Her daughter and her son sponsored the first printing press in England and edited the first ever book printed in England. I can speculate that her daughter’s court was the model for Thomas Malory’s vision of Camelot; but there is as yet no solid proof as to whether Jacquetta herself was an educated, scholarly woman, and if it was her love of learning which descended to her grandson Henry VIII and her great-granddaughter the studious Queen Elizabeth I.

  We know little about Elizabeth Woodville before she made her ambitious second marriage to the young King Edward IV. Her first marriage to a relatively obscure country gentleman left few traces. She is visible on the record during her time as queen; but we know less about the months when she saved herself and her daughters from Richard III, living in sanctuary. Did she really release her second son into his care when he had kidnapped her firs
t? Did she really believe that Richard III had murdered her sons and yet bring herself to reconcile with him, putting her daughters in his care – where their brothers had been? Why did she first conspire against him; but then order her son home from the court of Henry Tudor to reconcile with him? We know very little of what she was doing after the accession of Henry VII and the marriage of her daughter to the new king. Can it be that she really joined a plot against the incoming Tudor king, her own son-in-law? And why would she have done that?

  Margaret Beaufort’s official story is powerfully bland. We have few details about her magnificent organisation of the so-called Buckingham rebellion. Perhaps we can read much into the fact that at the time the rebellion was named the Beaufort rebellion – for her, the kingpin plotter at the centre of dangerous intrigue. It was later historians who re-named the plot and so helped to obscure her shocking treason against an ordained king of England and the betrayal of his queen – her friend. We know almost nothing about her relationships with her three husbands, nor with her daughter-in-law, who was of the rival house and the daughter of her enemy. We can only reconstruct her passionate and intimate relationship with her son from small snippets of gossip, and the architecture of the royal palaces that they designed together to give themselves, in every place, a small personal shared room.

  Our lack of knowledge about these women is caused by the scarcity of any records at all. The records that survive from this period are scanty. The vast majority of people were not literate, and those who did write letters, diaries or journals did not preserve their work. There are so few documents that they can be listed here: four chronicles, covering different, often short periods of time and often arguing different viewpoints; a few collections of private family letters, of which the Paston Letters are best known; the recorded impressions of a few foreign visitors; and the commissioned ‘History of England’ written by Polydore Vergil at the request of Henry VII.