The Women of the Cousins’ War

by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin

  . . . close the wall up with our English dead!

  In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

  As modest stillness and humility;

  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

  Then imitate the action of the tiger;

  Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

  Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;

  Then lend the eye a terrible aspect.

  The time of Jacquetta’s birth were the glory days for England as the young king, Henry V, invaded France in 1415 and won a tremendous victory at the battle of Agincourt, rolling out English power. The English and their allies occupied most of the northern half of the lands we now call France, including Paris. This was in addition to the traditional English holdings in the west of the country, around Bordeaux. These rich lands were the dowry of Eleanor of Aquitaine when she married Henry II of England, and a celebrated English possession for the previous 300 years.

  Jacquetta’s family, as counts of Luxembourg, were neighbours to France and vassals to the Duke of Burgundy. They had to choose sides in this conflict that had already absorbed the energies of England and France for seventy-eight years. Naturally enough, they chose to follow their ducal cousins to side with the English and feud against the Valois. Perhaps the Luxembourg family believed the English were morally right, perhaps they thought they would profit most from English neighbours, or perhaps the English simply looked like the stronger side and the safer bet.

  The lands of France in 1429

  In 1420 the French King Charles VI signed away the rights of his son Charles, and gave his daughter Catherine of Valois in marriage to the conquering Henry V of England, to seal the Treaty of Troyes. He made Henry V of England his heir, and the young English king, with a new-born son to follow him, must have thought that he had secured his lands in France for ever. But, aged only thirty-four, he died of dysentery after laying siege to Meaux in 1422, and the English lands in France, and the claim to the entire kingdom, were inherited by a nine-month-old baby: Henry VI. The country faced a long regency headed by the baby’s two uncles: Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, who ruled in England; and John Duke of Bedford, who was Regent of France.

  When Jacquetta was a little girl of six years old, her uncle Louis of Luxembourg was making his way from France to England to congratulate the baby boy who had so precociously inherited the throne of England and France. Louis de Luxembourg would go on to serve John Duke of Bedford as his chancellor for ten years from 1425–35, and was so reliable and trustworthy that Bedford named him as executor of his will.

  While the infant Henry VI was in his nursery, his homeland of England was disrupted by the growing powers of the rival nobles who ruled their own lands, disregarding both the young king and the law. In France, the little king’s inheritance was threatened by the French claimant: the disinherited Valois son Charles. Charles the Dauphin was an unpromising challenger to the regency of John Duke of Bedford. Named by his own mother as a bastard, disowned by his dead father, scarred by a terrible childhood, he was utterly baffled as to how he might win the kingdom that had been so abruptly given away to England.

  The arrival of Joan of Arc at the court of Charles the Dauphin was an extraordinary opportunity for the French cause. Her visionary leadership identified him as God’s choice for France, and led the demoralised French army to a string of victories in 1429. Her ambition was to drive the English utterly from the land. She even told them so, in a bold document in which she warned John Duke of Bedford to leave France or face the consequences: ‘Surrender to The Maid sent hither, by God the King of Heaven, the keys of all the good towns you have taken and laid waste in France . . . If you do not, expect to hear tidings from the Maid who will shortly come upon you to your very great hurt.’

  Claiming that she was inspired by the guidance of angels, riding under a banner of lilies, bearing a sword but never using it, the charismatic girl marched the French prince out of a sense of personal failure into Rheims Cathedral to be crowned and anointed with the sacred oil of the very first king of the Franks, Clovis. She led the French army up to the city walls of Paris and, if the Valois court had supported their heroine, she might have been completely victorious. The court’s failure to exploit the fantastic power that Joan of Arc brought them may well have been because they feared – as the English were convinced – that Joan was a witch. Joan’s claim to be guided by angels, her healing skills and her good luck were deeply suspicious qualities to her enemies; and even to those who followed her. In the story of Joan of Arc, which was a legend during Jacquetta’s childhood and thereafter, Jacquetta would have seen that an exceptional woman attracts attention which can prove to be fatal.

  It was another of Jacquetta’s uncles – John of Luxembourg – who did the English a once-in-a-lifetime service when one of his vassals dragged Joan of Arc from her horse during a skirmish at nearby Compiègne and brought her in to John’s castle at Beaurevoir near Cambrai. Louis, Jacquetta’s brother, was staying at the castle, placed with his uncle to learn the ways of the world. John of Luxembourg’s stepdaughter Jeanne de Bar was another guest. Jacquetta herself might have been there when Joan was brought in.

  John held Joan of Arc for four months while his wife Jehanne de Bethune, his stepdaughter Jeanne de Bar and his great-aunt Jeanne the Demoiselle of Luxembourg pleaded with him not to release ‘the Maid’ to the English, foreseeing, quite rightly, that it would be to send her to her death. While the Demoiselle lived with her nephew, Joan of Arc was safe; but when the old lady died in November 1430, John of Luxembourg accepted a fortune of 10,000 livres from the English, and defied the women of his household to send Joan to the Church. As they had feared, the English Regent of France, John Duke of Bedford, insisted on a show trial by the Church, and she was burned at the stake.

  THE LUXEMBOURG INHERITANCE

  Jacquetta’s father, the Count of Conversano and Brienne, was the oldest of the anglophile brothers and so, on the death of the Demoiselle of Luxembourg, he inherited the title and became Count Peter I of Luxembourg and St Pol. The family was well connected in Europe: the Luxembourgs were of the royal family of Bohemia; Jacquetta’s cousin was Sigismond, the Holy Roman Emperor. On her father’s side she descended from Duke John II of Brittany. On her mother’s side she descended from Simon de Montfort. Jacquetta could trace her ancestry back to English as well as European royalty. Indeed, she could go farther than this: her family could trace their line back through recorded history, into myth.

  The family city of Luxembourg was founded around a castle developed from a Roman fort built on a rock called ‘the Bock’ dominating the roads and rivers between France, Germany and the Low Countries. It was famous as one of the most powerful and defensible castles in Europe. The Counts of Luxembourg traced their ancestry back to the first count, Siegfried, who bought the site of the castle in 963 and was said to have married the water goddess Melusina. It was she who made the castle of Bock magically appear, the morning after her wedding. Their happy marriage lasted until Count Siegfried broke his vow of allowing her absolute privacy each month. Spying on her in her bath, he discovered that his wife was a magical being: half-woman, half-fish, something like a mermaid. He cried out in understandable shock, and Melusina and her bath immediately sank through the solid rock beneath the castle, and disappeared.

  Jacquetta would have known of this legend, which is stated as an accepted fact in her family tree, occurs in many versions all across Europe, and was recognised by C.G. Jung as an archetypal myth. Melusina appears as a character in alchemy; she represents water and the moon, the female presence. In adult life Jacquetta owned a copy of a rare manuscript of the history of Melusina, her ancestress, and Melusina may have been a theme at her daughter Elizabeth’s wedding, and at royal jousts. Whether Jacquetta regarded Melusina as a real ancestor or not, the metaphor was a deep and powerful one:

  GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

  HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so ca
n any man;

  But will they come when you do call for them?

  ‘Will they come when you do call for them?’ is perhaps the very question that Jacquetta would have asked herself, that the English Regent of France, John Duke of Bedford, would have asked of her, and that subsequent generations, frightened and attracted by her reputation, would like to know.

  FIRST MARRIAGE: ROYAL DUCHESS

  Jacquetta may have spent only a little time in the city of Luxembourg. Her father inherited his title when she was a very young woman, at a time when most girls of her class were sent away to stay with noble relations as a sort of ‘finishing school’. They would learn the skills and arts necessary for being a great lady by serving as companions or maids-in-waiting in other great houses under the discipline of the lady of the house. When she reached marriageable age, from fourteen years onward, Jacquetta’s parents would have arranged a match for their daughter. No young woman of her class would have been allowed to choose her own husband; her preference would probably not even have been consulted. Marriage was designed to confirm an alliance, to consolidate lands, to earn a dowry and to create an heir. The notion of love was a matter for troubadour poetry, or for bawdy jokes; it was not considered a reason for marriage. Jacquetta’s marriage was arranged unusually late, and it may have been one of passionate desire – at least on the side of her husband.

  Her marriage was arranged by her uncle, the Chancellor Louis of Luxembourg, at the request of his great friend and patron, John Duke of Bedford. Bedford’s first wife, Anne of Burgundy, had died of fever in November 1432 after a marriage that had lasted ten years. They too had married for dynastic reasons: their marriage confirmed the alliance between Burgundy and England, and throughout her life Anne was effective in maintaining the friendship of her brother the Duke of Burgundy, and the alliance between England and Burgundy which was essential to the balance of power that guaranteed English success against France. She seems to have been a woman of charm and energy, and generosity to the poor. Indeed, she caught the fatal fever after visiting the sick in the Hôtel-Dieu of Paris. Bedford stayed by her bedside during her illness and made a pilgrimage around the churches of Paris for her recovery. He could not save her. John Duke of Bedford, forty-three years old, weary after years of service in France, may perhaps have felt a great sense of loss and loneliness on the death of his wife. He was scandalously quick to seek comfort. Only five months after his loss he married Jacquetta – twenty-six years his junior. The marriage service was performed by her uncle, Bedford’s chancellor and trusted friend Louis of Luxembourg, in his bishop’s palace at Thérouanne.

  The hugely powerful, enormously wealthy Duke of Burgundy, Bedford’s former brother-in-law, was outraged that his sister’s widower should re-marry in such a short time. The tradition was that mourning should last a full year – but John Duke of Bedford must have been planning the marriage to his new wife within weeks of burying his first. He had chosen a daughter of the vassal of Burgundy: a snub to the ducal House of Burgundy, and an ill-judged show of favouritism to the House of Luxembourg. It widened the breach between Burgundy and England that undermined the military alliance of the two great landholders in northern France. The alliance between them had held the French at bay: a split would endanger English dominance in France. Perhaps Bedford hoped that the alliance with Luxembourg would replace the alliance with Burgundy; but his hasty second marriage to the seventeen-year-old was regarded as an insult to his first wife and brought him neither territory, nor title, nor dowry. It jeopardised his life’s work: English ownership of France. He must have been truly besotted.

  Marriage to John Duke of Bedford made the young Jacquetta the first lady of France, and second only to the king’s mother in England. It also brought her into immediate contact with the knife-edge politics of the long war. On his way to marry her, John Duke of Bedford paused in Calais to put down a mutiny in the garrison. The soldiers were complaining about arrears of pay. Usually such disputes ended peacefully with pardons and payment of back pay, but on this occasion the duke ordered the execution of four ringleaders. On the return journey, Bedford and his new wife called at the garrison to reinforce discipline. Bedford expelled eighty of the mutinous soldiers, who had to go home to England without any pay at all, and only then could the duke and his bride continue on to Paris.

  Here, Jacquetta was to be the mistress of the beautiful palace of the Hôtel de Bourbon, near the royal palace of the Louvre. She saw the extreme contrasts of warring medieval France – the terrible poverty in the streets, where beggars died of hunger, and the luxury and wealth behind the palace walls. Within the palace there was perhaps even a laboratory for alchemy, the mystical science of the medieval period.

  The study of alchemy had only been allowed in English lands under a royal licence since 1403, such was the fear and suspicion of this medieval ‘science’. But the desperate need for gold had inspired a renewal of interest. One of the promises of alchemy is that the adept might learn how to make the ‘philosopher’s stone’, a substance which refines base metal into gold. Alchemists believed that gold and other minerals were made slowly in the depths of the earth, and that this process could be speeded up, either by the flames of the forge or by the gentle heat of the water bath. John Duke of Bedford licensed alchemists in France to find the formula to make gold to pay his soldiers, and to find the other promised treasure of alchemy: the elixir that would prolong life – perhaps to eternity. Many of the great men of Europe, including Bedford’s brother Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, explored alchemy – a form of study which would in time evolve, on the one hand, into modern sciences, and, on the other, into mysticism. But to the medieval mind there was no separation between art, spirituality, magic and the sciences; and the spirit of the alchemist was as much an ingredient as the liquids he or she learned to distil, the metals they forged and the elements they discovered. It was a spiritual exercise as well as a science, and it still has adepts today.

  In her new home in Paris Jacquetta also found her husband’s famous library: religious texts and thirteen precious volumes of stories about Arthur, the mystical King of England. These were hand-copied manuscripts, made before the invention of printing, of great beauty as well as great rarity. They were to be read not only as entertaining stories, but also as prophecies of the future of England, and as a rule book for the imaginary chivalric world which was a guiding light to every man of honour. They may have made troubling reading for the Regent of France, since the stories emphasised the need for a king to be balanced in his health and temperament. His physical well-being determined the health of his lands. In the medieval world view the state of the body reflected the soul of a man: a man who was physically strong and beautiful would have a beautiful soul. The health of the king reflected the health of the nation: a physically strong and beautiful king would rule over a healthy and fertile land.

  As John would have known, there were already rumours that his young nephew the King of England was ‘cold’ and ‘moist’ – passive, and too easily influenced, a boy born under the sign of Luna, unlike his father Henry V, who had been ‘hot’ and ‘dry’, born under the sign of Mars: a fighting king.

  Just two months after her whirlwind wedding, Jacquetta visited England with her husband and met this new royal kinsman, Henry VI. The country was in crisis: the French wars were ruinously expensive, the nobility of England were running their own lands almost independent of any central control, the young king showed no signs of being able to assume the regal power that was his by right, and the growing rivalry between the lords, exacerbated by his favouritism, was a danger to the stability of the Crown. The king was under the influence of two rival family members: his uncle Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, a most astute and determined politician; and his great-uncle Cardinal Henry Beaufort, the son of John of Gaunt and his mistress (and later wife) Katherine Swynford.

  Bedford and his wife were greeted with the ritual and deference due to senior royals, and entered into this jockeying
for power and influence at the court of the twelve-year-old boy king. It must have been an extraordinary moment for the young duchess when she made a state entry into London beside her husband, through cheering crowds, with pageants and poems to greet her along the way. At first the parliament was sceptical about the work of the French regency but when they came to understand that John Duke of Bedford had given selfless service in France, they rewarded him for his loyalty and gave him permission to retire.

  At first it looked as if he might accept. The couple stayed in England for more than a year, and John Duke of Bedford was granted the wonderful Penshurst Place in Kent. Built in the previous century as an H-shaped medieval manor, Penshurst Place was originally designed as a show house by a wealthy London merchant. It featured a great central hall with a tiled floor and octagonal central hearth, faced by a raised dais for the dining table of the lord and his lady. Behind the dais rose a broad stair to the solar – the private rooms – with windows on three sides over the gardens, which were enclosed by a square of walls with towers at each corner. Bedford built a new wing, now called the Buckingham Building, and put his emblems – the falcon and the ibex – on the gables of the buildings to the west of the hall. He probably added the deep window splays, based on those he had admired at the papal palace at Avignon.

  While they were in England – Bedford battling with his rivals on the royal council, and Jacquetta enjoying life at court and overseeing the building of their new English home – she received a message from Luxembourg. Her father had died, probably of the Black Death, a form of bubonic plague. He was only forty-three years old, and had been Count of Luxembourg for only three years.

  The Black Death overshadowed Europe in this period, spreading along trade routes, killing more than a third, perhaps more than half, of the population of the continent. Every family lost a cousin, a brother, a daughter, a parent. Everyone paid the price of missing a family member who was earning money, planning the future, or embodying hope. From the poor, who could not get in the harvest or manage the animals, to the rich, who closed their castles in terror of the disease – and still died – the sickness swept through all Europe, destroying the culture with the people.