There was no time for regrets. The court’s attention nervously shifted to the defence of English Calais, the last great English stronghold left in France, and Richard Woodville Lord Rivers was commanded to forget all about Bordeaux and his vigil in Plymouth, and instead go to Calais with a crack division of sixty lances and 530 archers. He was ordered to serve under the favourite Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset, trusted with the defence of England’s last key possession in north France. Jacquetta, once again pregnant, must have feared for him as he set sail.
Though Henry VI of Lancaster was clearly unable to either maintain peace in England or guard English lands in France, this does not seem to have shaken the loyalty of Jacquetta and her husband to the Lancaster king and queen. They had seen at first hand his inability to raise funds or get things done, but – whatever criticisms they may have had of the king’s rule in private – Jacquetta and her husband were still unswervingly faithful to him and to his House in public. This was the way of the medieval lords, who were just moving from a feudal society into one where loyalties could be negotiated. Both Jacquetta and Richard had been raised to respect the ruling House of Lancaster. Their landlord, William de la Pole Duke of Suffolk, had died in its service, Jacquetta had been married to one of the great men of the House, and Sir Richard had been born and bred to serve it. The couple were leaders at the court of the Lancaster king and queen, and had been well rewarded. They may have been devoted to the House of Lancaster without a moment of doubt; they may even have been on the defensive, believing, as the royal couple warned, that the Duke of York’s call for reform was nothing more than cover for a treasonous plot against the rightful king.
THE MARRIAGE OF ELIZABETH
Certainly Jacquetta planned to keep her oldest daughter inside the House of Lancaster. In about 1452, the Rivers arranged the marriage of their oldest daughter Elizabeth – and they chose a Lancaster supporter for her husband. The match was made with Sir John Grey, the oldest son of Sir Edward Grey and his wife Lady Elizabeth Ferrers, who lived at Groby Hall, Leicestershire, and owned other houses and lands in the area. The Ferrers were great local landowners and the Greys could trace their line back to the Norman conquest. Their loyalty to the king and the House of Lancaster was proven. It was the young Sir John who had ridden out with Richard Woodville in the unsuccessful pursuit of Jack Cade in Kent. One of the Grey kinsman, Lord Grey of Ruthin, had murdered no less a person than the Speaker of Parliament as he was marching to support Richard Duke of York, the year before. This was an alliance between two staunch Lancastrian families. Elizabeth was aged fifteen, and her new husband was twenty. It was a good marriage for Jacquetta’s daughter, putting her among the established aristocracy of England with a fortune safely based on widespread lands in their neighbouring county. Jacquetta and Richard had eight other children to dispose of, including a new-born girl Eleanor: it must have been a relief to know that the oldest was settled.
A SORT OF PEACE
Perhaps the country might be at peace, too? In February of this year Richard Duke of York had marched an army to the very gates of London and found the city barred to him on the orders of the king. He had hoped to propose himself as the king’s heir, and to block the favourite Edmund Beaufort from the position; but he was unable to recruit support among the nobility. Instead, in a humiliating ceremony at St Paul’s, Richard Duke of York was forced to repeat his oath of loyalty to the king, and promise never to raise an army against him again. In return the forgiving king issued a general pardon for all rebels.
Perhaps Henry’s mildness could command England? Perhaps Henry could even conquer France. In the garrison town of Calais, Jacquetta’s husband Richard Woodville Lord Rivers received orders to requisition all the ships and bring them to Sandwich to ferry an invading force over the sea to France, that was to be led by the king himself. Henry VI had decided that he was going to follow in his father’s footsteps and invade France to reclaim the English lands around Calais. It would be typical of Richard Woodville Lord Rivers to put his fleet together in readiness for the king. At any rate we know that – typically of the king – the planned invasion never happened.
Instead Henry VI undertook another of his journeys around his kingdom, overseeing the trials of rebels against his rule. Kings of England traditionally lived in a travelling court, moving from one house to another to allow for cleaning, and to spread the burden of housing and feeding the court. In summer most kings travelled for the pleasure of hunting new areas, and to visit distant parts of the kingdom, demonstrating the majesty of the Crown. Henry VI used these progresses to enforce the law and to punish rebels. These tours of punishment, organised by the Duke of Somerset, were so successful in executing traitors that they were called the ‘harvest of heads’. This tour, from spring to autumn 1452, took the court westwards, into Richard Duke of York’s heartlands.
Travelling with the queen and the favourite Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset, the king personally supervised the trials and sentencing of men who lived in the areas loyal to Richard Duke of York and were accused of treason to the king. It was a strong implied criticism of the Duke of York, whose job it was to maintain the law in his domain. The king and court even stayed at Ludlow – Richard Duke of York’s principal town – but snubbed him and his family by not visiting Ludlow Castle.
That year, 1452, the court celebrated Christmas at Greenwich near London, and Jacquetta and her husband were probably reunited as Sir Richard came home for the festivities in which the king’s half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor were knighted and made Earls of Richmond and Pembroke. These young men had emerged as the sons of a secret marriage made by the king’s mother, Catherine of Valois, in the years of her widowhood after the death of Henry V. Jasper Tudor, the new Earl of Pembroke, received lands that had been confiscated from a York supporter; his brother, the new Earl of Richmond, would later be given the wardship of the fabulously wealthy Margaret Beaufort, with a view to marrying her and gaining her fortune. It must have seemed that the reign was finally becoming established. Treason had been rooted out over the previous summer, the rebels had been defeated, Richard Duke of York had been quiet under the snub to him and his house – and finally there was to be a new expedition against France, to regain the lands around Bordeaux, led by the veteran John Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury.
Better still, the court was delighted and relieved to learn in the spring of 1453 that at last Queen Margaret was pregnant, after seven years of barren marriage. Jacquetta, as one of the queen’s ladies, would have been among the first to know the news; the king, one of the last. Usually a queen would tell her husband the good news in private, and then he would announce it to the wider world. Margaret of Anjou sent a formal message to Henry VI by his chamberlain and he replied with a gift to her and rewarded the messenger as well.
Jacquetta too was expecting another baby; this was probably the year that she gave birth to Lionel, perhaps joining the court on another summer progress to the troubled regions, trying rebels and enforcing the king’s rule. But when they arrived at the royal hunting lodge in Wiltshire, they received terrible news from France. The veteran general John Talbot Earl of Shrewsbury, riding out for England at the age of sixty-five, had been wounded at Castillon outside Bordeaux and then cut to pieces by a battle axe; his son Lord Lisle died at his side. Talbot had fought for Henry VI’s heroic father, he had fought alongside Jacquetta’s husband the Duke of Bedford, he had been captured and released on parole by the French. The terms of his freedom were that he would not bear arms against the French again. Obedient to the rules of chivalry, which held that a knight’s word of honour could not be broken, he had led the English troops into battle without carrying any weapon to defend himself. His death and the final, irretrievable loss of all the English lands around Bordeaux were a dreadful reflection on Henry VI, the defeated heir to the previous, more heroic, generation. The records say that the king took ‘a sudden and thoughtless fright’, complained of feeling sleepy, and went to bed early. In
the morning he did not stir; he slipped into a catatonic state, and the court simply could not wake him.
THE FISHER KING
Margaret, seven months pregnant, and still only twenty-three years old, took the extraordinarily bold decision to conceal the fact that the King of England was incapable of speech, thought or even movement. Jacquetta would have been party to the secret as they moved the king from Wiltshire to Westminster and kept him in his rooms. He was passive and silent even when the queen and her advisers shouted at him and then tortured him with medieval cures. Doctors were called in secret and he was leeched, purged, sweated and chilled, but he showed no signs of recovery.
What was wrong with the king? Modern opinion suggests that he may have had some form of stroke from the shock of the news of Talbot’s death and the defeat of England, or he may have inherited madness through his Valois mother, perhaps schizophrenic catatonia. Medieval medicine, based on the theory of ‘humours’, could offer no useful diagnosis or treatment. All they could do was to try to change his ‘cold’ and ‘moist’ temperament by heating him up through purging, bleeding, blistering and medicating. Queen Margaret personally hired alchemists, physicians and herbalists to try to restore him to full health.
Once the news leaked out from the small court circle, there was a storm of gossip and a whirlwind of claims that the king was sick as a result of magic and enchantment. On 12 July 1453, one man accused a group of Bristol merchants of bringing about the king’s collapse by sorcery. Another man confessed to casting a spell over the king’s cloak. Magical, mystical and metaphysical explanations were offered. The metaphor of a sick king became widespread in the culture. People referred to the myth of the Fisher King – a king whose weakness and sickness bled the kingdom of vigour, and who must be replaced by a healthy young champion who alone could heal the malaise of the kingdom. The Fisher King was a king so wounded that he was all-but dead, but he would not die and leave an heir. In the story, all he can do is go fishing, waiting for a saviour to arrive. This story was painfully close to the reality of the sleeping king and his unborn child and when disseminated in ballads, art and story-telling it would do much to encourage the House of York when the healthy and energetic Richard Duke of York was compared with the enfeebled king. Alchemical theories that spoke of the inevitable collapse of the old and the rise of the new were applied to the decline of Henry and the rise of his rival.
Margaret first took her all-but unconscious husband to Westminster Palace but soon realised that he had to be kept away from the noise of the city, and out of sight of gossips, and so moved him to Windsor Castle. She had to leave him there, in the hands of his physicians, to go into her confinement at Westminster. She was supported by her women, including Jacquetta, when she went into the shaded enclosed rooms at Westminster Palace that were traditional for the six-week royal confinement. During this time she could see no men, she had to be attended exclusively by women; even the visiting priest had to celebrate Mass behind a screen. In effect, the country was without any ruler as the king was asleep and the queen in confinement.
It must have been a long anxious wait: childbirth and the related infections and complications were a life-threatening experience, and this was Margaret’s first pregnancy. No male physicians were allowed to examine the queen, whose body was almost sacred; but anyway male physicians had little knowledge. The midwives would have been experienced; but there was no science of gynaecology or paediatrics, and no awareness of hygiene or the transmission of infection. Jacquetta’s own eleven births must have made her a leader among the women as they waited for the baby to come and prayed that the queen would survive and the king recover.
Though formally in seclusion Margaret knew that in the outside world the jockeying for position was still going on. In the absence of the king, Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset was dominating the councils of the lords, and excluding his rival Richard Duke of York. Richard in turn was still threatening to accuse Edmund of treason for the loss of the English lands in France. Even worse for the queen was her knowledge that, outside the hushed confinement chamber, her husband was slipping deeper and deeper into a death-like state. On 13 October 1453 she gave birth to the long-awaited son and heir and named him Edward. She must have wondered what his future would be.
To be established as a son and heir to the King of England, the baby had to be recognised by the king before a great council. Somerset called the lords together for the event; excluding the Duke of York. Though the queen was still in confinement, recovering from childbirth, the Duke of York’s wife, the redoubtable Cecily Neville, came into the confinement chamber to appeal to the queen for her husband’s right to attend. The duchess’s intrusion paid off, and her husband Richard Duke of York was present when the baby was taken up the river from Westminster to Windsor Castle to be presented to the king. It was a ceremony that must have given the ambitious duke yet more hope. The council travelled by barges upriver to the king’s apartments at Windsor Castle and watched as the baby was placed in his arms – the king responded not at all.
To some people this suggested that the king was not the true father. They claimed that a true father would have woken at the sight of his new-born child. More seriously, it indicated that the baby could not be christened as Prince of Wales since he had not received the king’s formal recognition as his son and heir. Usually, the king would recognise his son, present him to the nobility, and then the boy baby could go on to his christening and recognition as heir to the throne. In this situation, there was no constitutional precedent; nobody knew quite what should be done.
Despite all this, the queen boldly pressed ahead with the christening of her son, and nobody had the political force or the will to refuse her. Prince Edward was baptised in Westminster Abbey by the king’s own confessor, Bishop William Waynflete. One of his godfathers, defiantly chosen by the queen herself, was Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset, fuelling gossip that suggested that the controversial court favourite might even be the baby’s true father. Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, ally to Richard Duke of York, said in public that the baby was a bastard, palmed off on a torpid cuckold.
In November, Jacquetta was with the queen as she emerged for the great ceremony of ‘churching’: the new mother’s purification and return to the outside world. Margaret came out of her confinement chamber to find York increasingly powerful in the Privy Council; so much so that he had gained a majority and was at last able formally to accuse Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset of treason. The lords who came to arrest Beaufort found him with the queen in her private rooms, seized him despite her protests, and took him to the Tower.
The king’s illness could not be ignored for ever; the lords who were already in dispute about lands and power took the opportunity to pursue their quarrels without fear of royal intervention. The royal council still tried to behave as if it was reporting to the king, but now issued petitions in its own name. Christmas came and went and there was no king leading the festivities at court. In effect, England was without a king, and had been so for the best part of half a year, though nobody dared ask what was to be done.
Margaret, in defence of her little son and his father’s throne, proposed herself as regent, demanding the power, privileges and income of the king. She had been raised by the mighty Yolande of Aragon and had seen the great women of her childhood running their countries when the lords were away. She thought that such an arrangement could be made in England. But, beyond the circle of her friends in the established court party, she gained very little support for the idea. Neither the country nor the parliament could forgive her French background, few people trusted her, and almost nobody wanted a woman running England. They can have been in no doubt that to make Margaret regent would be to release Edmund Beaufort from the Tower and to restore the full power of the Lancastrian party. In an atmosphere of gathering tension, with the lords bringing their private armies into the city and Edmund Beaufort Duke of Somerset ordering his friends and affinity to rent rooms
around his prison in the Tower, presumably in preparation for a break-out, the death of the king’s chancellor Cardinal Kemp in March 1454 meant that a new chancellor had to be appointed and new seals made. Only the king could make such an appointment. The king simply had to wake up and name a new chancellor.
Once again a delegation from the council went on the cold journey upriver to Windsor Castle to ask the mute king to nominate a new chancellor. Three times they asked him for a response – but, once again, he heard and said nothing.
YORK TAKES COMMAND
It was enough for everyone but the stubborn queen. Three days later, on 27 March 1454, the council admitted that they had to have a leader. Richard Duke of York was appointed protector and defender of the kingdom until the recovery of the king or the inheritance – fourteen long years ahead – of his baby son. One of York’s first acts was to send the queen to Windsor Castle to join her husband and son, and suggest that they all stay there. The royal family was under house arrest, their favourite Somerset – charged with treason – was still imprisoned in the Tower, their adherents quietly removed from office: the Yorks were in power and they were ruling without a king.
For Jacquetta this was an uncomfortable and dangerous time. She was pregnant again this year with the baby she named Margaret, perhaps as a tribute towards her beleagured queen: the two women were all-but imprisoned together in Windsor Castle with a comatose king, a small prince and a diminished court. Jacquetta was parted from her husband: he was isolated overseas, left in command of Calais, still at his post throughout these changes, defending the greatest, indeed the last, English garrison in France. Richard Woodville Lord Rivers had been appointed by the king and Edmund Beaufort; and now the king was asleep and Edmund Beaufort imprisoned.
The Women of the Cousins’ War Page 8