Perhaps Jacquetta thought that the charges were part of a plot against Eleanor and her husband: an attempt to destroy their influence on the young king. Jacquetta would have known that once sorcery or witchcraft was invoked, a woman could be slandered and destroyed with the most flimsy evidence. Dealing in magic was a charge almost impossible to disprove, since a denial, even a denial on sacred oath, was typical of a witch and evidence of guilt. On the other hand, no proof was necessary to support the charge: a single accusation by any man of importance – a priest or a lord – served as evidence of guilt. The case against Eleanor Duchess of Gloucester showed that the highest status in England was not enough to save a woman once she was named as a witch.
COUNTRY AND COURT
Jacquetta and her husband may have been glad to spend time in the country in 1441. Away from the dangerous and anxious court the young couple inherited more land at Grafton, including another house called ‘The Bury’, on the death of Richard Woodville’s father. They conceived their first surviving son, Anthony Woodville, who was probably born in 1442, perhaps followed by two sisters, Mary and Jacquetta, in the two following years. Part of Jacquetta’s story is of physical strength: she gave birth to fourteen children, perhaps more. She often had a new baby every year; there was no reliable contraception, which was, in any case, regarded as a sin. She may have completed her family after her last baby, Katherine Woodville in 1458, as a result of menopause, which could well have occurred for her at around forty years old.
Bad news came from Europe. Jacquetta’s family’s patron, Philip III Duke of Burgundy, captured the castle and the duchy of Luxembourg in 1443. The final heir to the imperial line of the Luxembourg family, Elizabeth of Gorlitz Duchess of Luxembourg, had made an agreement with him that he should have the duchy on her death, but the powerful Duke Philip decided not to wait. The members of the wider Luxembourg family were furious at this theft; but there was little they could do to defend their title against such a wealthy and powerful lord.
Jacquetta was pregnant again in 1444 with her son John when the peace treaty between France and England was sealed with the betrothal of a French princess to the young King of England. Charles VII of France did not betroth any of his own daughters to his traditional enemy, but offered the daughter of one of his vassals. The fourteen-year-old Princess Margaret of Anjou was accepted, and a party of English nobility set out from England to escort the young princess to her new country. They were led by the Woodvilles’ landlord and patron William de la Pole, and his wife Alice – granddaughter of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer. With them went the senior courtiers to honour the princess, among them Jacquetta and her husband Sir Richard.
Jacquetta’s younger sister Isabelle de St Pol had recently married Charles du Maine, Margaret of Anjou’s uncle, so Jacquetta was able to greet the new Queen of England as a kinswoman, and the two young women became friends, sharing the experience of being foreign girls married into the English royal family. Margaret of Anjou chose Jacquetta to be one of her chief ladies-in-waiting, and the regular New Year gifts throughout her reign show the warmth and constancy of their relationship. It was Margaret’s habit to pay the servants of her favourites a cash gift of 66/8d. each year, and Jacquetta’s servants regularly received this from the queen. Based on her gift records, her two greatest favourites were the two women who greeted her when she was a young royal bride in France: Alice, wife of William de la Pole; and Jacquetta Woodville, the Dowager Duchess of Bedford.
The fifteen-year-old princess arrived in England to meet her sensitive husband, a young man raised as a scholar, inclined to a life of prayer, dominated by his advisers. The two most prominent of these were now his great-uncle Cardinal Beaufort, and the king’s cousin, the 38-year-old Edmund Beaufort. The king’s uncle Humphrey Duke of Gloucester, still under the shadow of suspicion, was increasingly marginalised. A new man of increasing importance in the king’s council was the Woodvilles’ lord William de la Pole, now Marquis of Suffolk. Margaret came to like and trust William de la Pole during their slow progress through France to England, and became close friends with his wife Alice. It became clear that he and Edmund Beaufort, the handsome but penniless Earl of Somerset, were working together to command the royal councils, excluding the good advice of other noblemen such as Richard Duke of York, a royal cousin whose long service and military success in France should have guaranteed him the respect of the court. However, since Richard Duke of York was the wealthiest nobleman in the country and an heir with royal blood, there were many who feared his power and influence, and were glad when de la Pole and Beaufort conspired to send him overseas to serve in Calais, and later to Ireland.
Margaret was determined to serve her French kinsman and king, Charles VII of France, and to see her father restored to his hereditary lands in Anjou that had been captured by the English. It did not take long before the English court and subjects started to murmur that she and William de la Pole were serving the cause of France and not of England. Jacquetta, as a lady at the queen’s court, would have observed the growing friendship between the queen and William de la Pole, and would also have heard the ugly rumours which suggested a love affair between the fifteen-year-old bride and the 47-year-old courtier. This was the first gossip against Margaret that linked her supposed disloyalty as a queen of England to her alleged infidelity as a wife. Rumours like this were to spoil her relationship with the people of her new country. Jacquetta almost certainly would have warned Margaret that a prominent woman’s reputation must be above slander; but the young queen was passionate in her loyalty to her friends and both she and her husband often chose badly. Jacquetta would have taken leave from court in 1445 for the birth of her son John, and the next year to give birth to Richard.
Meanwhile the rivalry between the king’s advisers came to a head when the young king, warned by the rising man at court William de la Pole, became convinced that his uncle Humphrey Duke of Gloucester was planning to usurp his throne and assassinate him. In 1447 a parliament was summoned at Bury St Edmunds. When Humphrey of Gloucester arrived, he was put under arrest in his lodgings. A few days later he was found dead.
It may well have been a heart attack but there were many who believed that he had been murdered. By the time the gossips got to work on the story, the ‘good duke’ Humphrey had been assassinated by a combination of plotters: William de la Pole, Queen Margaret, and – absurdly – Cardinal Beaufort, who was actually dying of old age, in his own bed, at the time.
The young King Henry VI was deeply in debt and yet still he recklessly distributed honours and favours, carving into Crown lands and giving away important posts with huge fees attached. His projects – King’s College at Cambridge University, and Eton College near Windsor – were more costly than he could afford. William de la Pole was promoted again, from marquis to duke, and the favourite Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset was showered with gifts in an attempt to make his fortune rival that of the wealthiest man in England: Richard Duke of York.
The Woodville family benefited too. Sir Richard Woodville was offered promotion to the title of baron in May 1448 and had to choose his new family name. He took the name of ‘Rivers’ perhaps as a reference to the Redvers family whose griffin sergeant he added to his own coat of arms, or perhaps he was laying claim to the disused title of de Ripariis of Aungre. Perhaps it was a tribute to his wife’s watery ancestry of Melusina. Either way, in the next reign it was the source of a great joke against the social climbing of the family, as Edward IV’s official court fool declared that he could not walk dry-shod anywhere in England as the Rivers had ‘been so high that I could hardly scrape through them’.
A mistimed, misguided, misdirected attack on Fougères in Brittany by the court favourite Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset in 1449 broke the temporary peace between England and France and led to a counter-attack from the French. The English were miserably defeated and the country was appalled as the soldiers and refugees came streaming home. Hungry, defeated, unpaid and without comp
ensation, bitterly critical of the government which had lost their lands, these refugees disrupted the country and blamed the king’s council for the worst failure in the long years of warfare. Everything that the king’s father, the heroic Henry V, had won, now seemed to be lost, and the young Queen Margaret was regarded as the child of the enemy and widely suspected of secretly working for them.
Her reputation was damaged again when her own father, René of Anjou, a vassal of France, marched against her subjects, laid siege to the great English capital of Rouen, and captured it from the English. For Jacquetta this must have been a particularly painful defeat. Rouen had been the jewel in the crown of the English possessions in France, and her first husband John Duke of Bedford had chosen to be buried in the cathedral there that he had richly endowed. Now his very grave and monument were in the hands of his lifelong enemy, and everything he had fought for was lost to the father of the young Queen of England.
Outraged by English defeats, the parliament charged William de la Pole with treason in 1450, accusing him of planning to marry his young son to his wealthy ward, the Lancastrian heiress Margaret Beaufort, and to seize the throne in their name. William de la Pole was indeed planning for the children’s marriage, and a form of betrothal had already taken place; but he proudly denied the charges of a coup, and King Henry, prompted by Queen Margaret, overruled his own parliament, and allowed the royal favourite to flee the country for what they planned would be only a brief exile. But as the young royals celebrated their triumph over the parliament, the duke’s ship was overtaken at sea by a mystery vessel, the duke kidnapped and cruelly beheaded with a rusty sword on a rocking boat. His body was thrown down on the sands of Dover beach, his head set on a stake. His wife Alice had to tell the queen of his death and young Margaret took to her rooms in the palace of Westminster, crying unstoppably for three days.
The fury and distress of the young royal couple at the murder of their friend and mentor led them to swear vengeance against the whole county of Kent. The sheriff of Kent, William Crowmer, and his father-in-law, the king’s treasurer Lord Say, threatened to empty the county of people and turn it into ‘a deer park’. But the declaration of vengeance only inspired a rebel who rose up in Kent and called for the reformation of the king’s council. He was Jack Cade, also using the names Jack Amend-All and John Mortimer in a compliment to the family name of the absent and disregarded Richard Duke of York. He petitioned that the king should reclaim the royal lands that he had so readily given away; he should punish the kinsmen of William de la Pole for his crimes; he should take new councillors from among the traditional lords, especially the Duke of York; he should bring the alleged murderers of his uncle Humphrey Duke of Gloucester to trial (by which he meant Edmund Beaufort); he should punish those responsible for losing the lands in France (Edmund Beaufort again); he should end unfair taxation and dismiss corrupt officers of his household (probably Edmund Beaufort again) and dismiss those who were unjust or corrupt in the county of Kent. An army gathered around Cade, whose military skill and experience – perhaps learned as an English soldier in France – was powerfully demonstrated as he marched his men, including yeomen and gentry of the county, to face the royal army south of London.
Jacquetta and the queen probably watched King Henry put on his battle armour, and ride out of London at the head of a royal army to command the rebels to go home. The rebels retreated south into Kent pursued by a small detachment of the royal force, including Jacquetta’s husband Lord Rivers and a young man, nineteen-year-old John Grey of Groby Hall. A skilled feint from Cade’s army led the royal army into a trap and Cade won the first battle, killing two royal commanders and putting the troops to flight. Rivers and his young recruit Grey were lucky to get away with their lives. It was a dramatic defeat for royal power. Many soldiers of the king’s army immediately deserted and joined Jack Cade, and more rebel volunteers came in from all the southern counties of England as the news of his victory spread. The men of Kent had started a popular uprising against royal tyranny.
After hesitating for a couple of days, Henry and the queen ignored the pleas of the Mayor of London, and abandoned the city to fend for itself, dashing a hundred miles north, to the fortified castle of Kenilworth, one of the safe royalist Lancaster-owned properties. The lords and nobility in fear of their lives, most probably with Jacquetta and her husband among them, piled into the most defensible place – the Tower of London – and prepared for a siege.
The rebels entered the city in triumph, Cade striking the London stone, a monument traditionally regarded as the heart of the city, and thus claiming ownership of the capital of England. The Mayor of London gave him the keys to the city and hosted a dinner for him. For a heady two days it looked like a victorious popular revolution. Cade, dressed in stolen armour and wearing the dead royal commander’s spurs, demanded that the men who had sworn to destroy Kent be released to him, and the lords in the Tower meekly sent Lord Say and the sheriff of Kent out to certain death. Cade held a mock court and ordered their execution. Their severed heads were paraded on pikes in a triumphant march.
The city had so far supported the rebels; but when Cade’s men started looting houses and businesses, the London merchants and apprentices counter-attacked; the royalist forces in the Tower, Sir Richard Woodville probably among them, came out and together they drove the rebels out of the city, over the bridge to the south of the river. There, they were issued with royal pardons in a transparent attempt to persuade them to go home. These pardons were not all honoured: Cade took his pardon in the name of Mortimer but was hunted down as Jack Cade and killed. The king returned from the country and personally supervised the trials and execution of more than thirty of the rebels: an inglorious end to his inglorious debut in arms.
THE COUSINS IN CONFLICT
Jack Cade was dead – betrayed by a king who did not keep his word – but Jack Cade’s cause was not forgotten. Richard Duke of York used the rebellion as an instance of the failure of the king’s council to keep the peace, adopted Cade’s manifesto as his own programme of reform, and demanded admission to the king’s council, and the arrest of Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset. The queen personally defended the royal favourite and blocked his arrest. Now the two royal kinsmen – Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset of the House of Lancaster, and Richard Plantagenet Duke of York – were locked in a bitter rivalry to influence the king. The opposing cousins in the war that would be named after them – ‘the cousins’ war’ – were identified. Later historians would give the battles the name of ‘the Wars of the Roses’ as York used a white rose as its emblem and Lancaster sometimes showed a red rose among its badges; but at the time, the people who marched in the ranks, and were summoned by their lords, called this ‘the cousins’ war’: an argument inside a family, with all the bitterness of a family feud.
Matters came to a head when York landed from his post in Ireland, marched on London and walked, unannounced and uninvited, into the king’s own rooms. His first demands were that his service to his country be recognised, and that he be consulted as to the governing of the country. Later he was to demand reforms, justice, and the impeachment of Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset for losing the lands in France and for failing in his duty to give good advice. But first York assured the king of his personal loyalty. There was no question yet of him wanting to be named as heir to the still-childless king.
It was a dramatic intervention; but it had almost no effect on the king and queen, so Richard Duke of York took his complaints to the parliament and started slowly to build up support as a reformer, calling for the impeachment of the royal favourite Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset, for his loss of English Normandy.
JACQUETTA POSTED TO PLYMOUTH
This victory of the French army against the English in Normandy meant that the French were now free to turn their attention to the rich lands of Gascony around Bordeaux, which the English had held for generations. This was the dowry of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the English heartland in Franc
e: everyone was clear that it must be defended. King Henry appointed Jacquetta’s husband, Richard Woodville Lord Rivers, as seneschal of Gascony, and Jacquetta probably went with him to Plymouth as he mustered an army and the ships to transport it to Bordeaux. They would have planned to reinforce the English settlers in Bordeaux; they would have expected to live there as Lord and Lady of Gascony. In a life that had already had many changes, Jacquetta, who gave birth to Martha in 1450, must have prepared herself for new lands and a new position.
A fleet of eighty-six ships was commandeered, and an army of 4,000 men recruited that summer. But there were no funds to pay them. Richard Woodville Lord Rivers struggled to keep his fleet and his force together through the winter, receiving small payments from the king, who was forced to raise money from the clergy of Canterbury and the London customs, seize cargoes from the Genoese merchants and even sell jewels and plate to raise funds.
Lord Rivers struggled to keep his unpaid and unhappy force together and ready to embark. For a whole year, as his men stole and begged in Cornwall and Devon, Jacquetta’s husband negotiated to hold his fleet and army together, and Jacquetta waited for the date of sailing. But in July 1451 the town of Bordeaux surrendered before the expedition to save it had even cast a rope or set a sail. For Richard Woodville and Jacquetta, whose early lives had been devoted to the holding of English lands in France, it must have been a bitter year of failure. They had waited at the dockside with their expeditionary force doing nothing, while the brave English citizens of Bordeaux had gone down fighting.
The Women of the Cousins’ War Page 7