The Women of the Cousins’ War

by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin

  For Edward it was a marriage of irresistible desire, and he may have hoped that he would be able to conceal it, or even deny it. Indeed, it may be true that he had previously promised marriage to Lady Eleanor Butler and then denied the promise; an unscrupulous womaniser, he may have thought he might play that trick again. But the wedding that Jacquetta witnessed and perhaps planned had to be revealed in September 1464, when the royal councillors meeting Edward at Reading urged him to confirm his intention of marrying the sister-in-law of the King of France, Princess Bona of Savoy. Edward decided to admit that he was already married, and to a woman formerly of the House of Lancaster, a woman of no fortune, and a woman who was not a virgin; but on the contrary had two strapping sons from a former marriage.

  The uproar that ensued was the major step in the gradual alienation of Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick, from his young cousin and protégé. Edward turned more and more to his new in-laws as his advisers, and Jacquetta’s husband Richard Woodville became Earl Rivers in 1466 and was appointed to the prime post of Constable of England. Jacquetta made sure that all the Woodville children made superb marriages, mopping up all the eligible heirs and heiresses, and leaving Edward’s former great friend and supporter with two daughters on the shelf. Even Elizabeth’s son from her first marriage, Thomas Grey, married an heiress, the little daughter of the Duke of Exeter. All this caused yet more concern to the established aristocracy, especially the Earl of Warwick.

  For Jacquetta, the rise of her daughter meant her own restoration to the place of a leading lady in England and Europe. Jacquetta’s younger brother Jacques of Luxembourg came to Elizabeth’s grand coronation on 26 May 1465, representing his lord, the Duke of Burgundy, and demonstrating to the English snobs that the new queen had noble relations on her mother’s side, even if her father had been nothing more than a knight. At the same time, Jacquetta’s oldest brother, and the head of her house, Louis, the Count of Luxembourg, was playing European politics and had turned against Louis XI of France to take the side of his brother Charles Duke of Berry. The gamble paid off for the moment: in the settlement which followed, Jacquetta’s brother Louis was appointed Constable of France and took, as his second wife, Maria of Savoy, the sister of the Queen of France.

  Jacquetta was first lady at the English court once again, related to European royalty, her husband a royal kinsman just as when she was a young woman. It must have struck her powerfully that although she was fully restored – and even grander than before – the house that she had served for so long had utterly fallen. In July 1465 her former king, Henry VI, was brought into London with his feet tied to his horse’s stirrups, a prisoner, captured near Brungerley in Lancashire. He was held in the Tower of London; he may have slipped into mental illness once again. Jacquetta’s own grandson, Thomas Grey, was among the five members of the royal household appointed to wait on her former king.

  Jacquetta and her family would seem to be established for life, until the man who had been nicknamed ‘the Kingmaker’ – the Earl of Warwick – defied Edward IV and married his daughter Isabel to the king’s younger brother, George Duke of Clarence. Based in the formidable fortress of Calais, Warwick once again stirred up unrest in Yorkshire, complaining about the influence of royal favourites – ‘certain seditious persons’ – this time meaning Jacquetta and her family; and in July 1469, Warwick, his brother-in-law the Earl of Oxford and his son-in-law George Duke of Clarence invaded England, once again from Calais.

  Edward was waiting in Nottingham for reinforcements, before making his march on the rebels. Elizabeth his wife was in the city of Norwich, continuing with a planned royal progress. Richard Woodville Earl Rivers and his sons were with the king, and Jacquetta was at the family home at Grafton when the royal reinforcements, marching on their way to join King Edward, crossed the path of the Yorkshire rebels marching south to meet the Earl of Warwick. A muddle or disagreement between the royal commanders, the Earls of Pembroke and Devon, led to the victory of the rebel forces at Edgecote near Banbury and to Edward’s first defeat.

  Edward, understanding very well that his wife’s family were in mortal danger from the victorious rebels, whose complaints included the bad influence of the Woodville family, sent his father-in-law Sir Richard Woodville Earl Rivers with his son John Woodville away from the conflict. Father and son went back to their home at Grafton and then started to make their way into the safety of Wales. Jacquetta may have seen them leave the family home that she had shared with her husband for thirty years. It would be the last time she would see the man she had married for love, and the son she had managed to wed to a duchess.

  Father and son were captured by the Earl of Warwick’s men and taken to Coventry. Sir Richard Woodville, that faithful knight who had survived so many battles, was beheaded with his 24-year-old son John at his side on the orders of the Earl of Warwick and George Duke of Clarence. There was no charge and there was no trial – indeed there could be none – for the 64-year-old Richard Woodville and his son were fighting for their anointed king against rebels. Their heads were struck from their bodies and put on the walls of Coventry, like traitors. The king himself was captured by Warwick and taken to the Warwicks’ family seat of Middleham Castle in Wensleydale.

  Warwick sent an armed guard to the Woodville home at Grafton and had Jacquetta snatched from her home by a squire named Thomas Wake, with the intention of trying her as a witch. The punishment for witchcraft was death – perhaps Warwick’s hope was that if he killed the key Woodville family members, especially the queen’s parents, he would regain his dominance over the young man he had raised to be king.

  There was a formal trial for the duchess accused of witchcraft. Jacquetta was arraigned and witnesses were called. A small model was produced: ‘an image of lead made like a man of arms of the length of a man’s finger, broken in the middle, and made fast with a wire’. The court was told that it had been made by Jacquetta to perform witchcraft and sorcery.

  Another witness was called: John Daunger, the parish clerk of Stoke Bruerne, Northamptonshire, who lived just two miles from Jacquetta’s home at Grafton. He said that there were two other images made by Jacquetta: one to symbolise the king and one for the queen.

  This evidence alone was enough to justify a death sentence for Jacquetta. Warwick had already executed her husband and son without trial; he may have been planning to punish the entire family for their seduction of the king. He may also have genuinely believed that Jacquetta was a practising witch – this was a time of increased fear and suspicion about witchcraft that would culminate in 1484 with a papal bull calling for the pursuit and arrest of witches.

  Jacquetta, newly widowed and mourning the loss of her son, must have been very afraid. She would remember the three women that she had known personally who had suffered under the same accusation, and she would have heard of many others. Her own first husband had ordered the death of Joan of Arc, burned for witchcraft, and she had been present at the trial that led to the burning of Margery Jourdemayne and the miserable and long punishment of Eleanor Cobham, another royal duchess.

  But amazingly, Warwick failed to conclude the trial with a sentence and an execution. Perhaps, when he actually faced Jacquetta, he did not dare to send such a powerfully well-connected and formidable woman to her death. Although he was clearly preparing the court for a death sentence, something made him change his mind, and he released Jacquetta.

  What can have persuaded Warwick against sentence and execution, even though he had such compelling evidence to hand, and witnesses who swore to Jacquetta’s guilt? Although the witnesses later recanted and quarrelled among themselves, there was more than enough evidence to justify a sentence of guilty and an execution as a witch. Perhaps he feared Jacquetta’s powers, perhaps he feared the influence of her family, her long friendship with Margaret of Anjou or the devotion of her daughter the queen, and the other surviving Woodville children, all of them highly placed thanks to their mother’s marriage arrangements. At any rate
, he released her and she went to join her daughter Elizabeth, who was holding the Tower of London ready for a siege. A little later, Warwick also failed to hold Edward the king, who defied his imprisonment by behaving like a monarch on an extended house visit, summoning his councillors, and enjoying the amenities. Warwick could not manage the country without a king, especially when there was a new outbreak of unrest. Edward took his freedom and rejoined his wife.

  Jacquetta’s grief for the loss of her husband and son must have been intense. But at least her daughter was safe and restored to her position by the return of her husband and a compromise agreement patched up between Warwick and Edward IV. Warwick’s nephew was named as Duke of Bedford – it must have irritated Jacquetta to see her first husband’s title given away – and the young boy was betrothed to the young York princess, Elizabeth. Jacquetta appealed to the great council before the king and the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to clear her name of the slur of witchcraft.

  It is this complaint, recorded in the Calendar of Patent Rolls, that describes Jacquetta’s accusation and trial by Warwick. Confronted by Jacquetta’s son-in-law the King of England, and the lords of the land both temporal and spiritual, the witnesses dissolved into mutual recriminations and withdrew their accusations. Warwick himself was present when Jacquetta’s name was officially cleared; but the slur of witchcraft, of course, remained. Indeed, it remains to this day.

  The accord between the king, his brother George and his former mentor Warwick was to be short-lived. In a second attempt on England, Warwick, with the king’s brother George Duke of Clarence, now in alliance with the former queen Margaret of Anjou, invaded in September 1470 and caught Edward unawares. Jacquetta had to see her oldest son Anthony and the king flee for their lives into exile as they escaped dramatically, in a small boat across the sea to the Low Countries. In Flanders, they found safety with Jacquetta’s kinsman the Duke of Burgundy. Jacquetta herself, her pregnant daughter Elizabeth the queen, and the three York princesses – Elizabeth (four), Mary (three) and Cecily (just one year old) – fled into the safety of sanctuary in Westminster Abbey, in the crypt of a church in St Margaret’s churchyard. It was there, with Jacquetta assisting, that the new baby was born. In a stroke of fantastic luck, that Edward so often enjoyed, the baby was a boy, an heir for the House of York and a powerful symbol for their future. They called him Edward.

  The convention of ‘sanctuary’ – the immunity of criminals from arrest if they stayed on hallowed ground – guaranteed the safety of the little family only while they stayed within the confines of the sanctuary house of the abbey, so Jacquetta, her daughter and grandchildren were in effect under house arrest in a basement, with no prospect of release other than a counter-coup. Henry VI was taken out of his imprisonment in the Tower of London, and paraded through the city for an official crown-wearing ceremony, to symbolically re-establish his rule. True power was in the hands of Warwick and his son-in-law George Duke of Clarence; but it may have been the king who insisted that sanctuary was respected and that Jacquetta and her daughter and grandchildren were not arrested.

  However, George Duke of Clarence had been secretly turned against his ally the Earl of Warwick. In a conspiracy of women, George’s mother and sister had sent a lady-in- waiting over to France to persuade him to ally with his brother Edward. When Edward invaded England, George changed sides, deserted Warwick and joined with his brother to enter London in triumph and then defeat the Earl of Warwick, fighting through thick mist at the battle of Barnet on 14 April 1471. The weather was so disadvantageous to Warwick and his army that there were people at the time who thought that, once again, Edward had been assisted by witchcraft.

  Jacquetta was liberated with her daughter Elizabeth, the baby prince and the three princesses, and went to the Tower for safety while Edward led his army straight from victory at Barnet to face the invasion of Margaret of Anjou with her seventeen-year-old son Edward. It must have been painful for Jacquetta to know that her son-in-law was facing her friend and former queen at the battle of Tewkesbury, and she must have been grieved when she learned that the young Prince Edward had been killed and his mother Margaret of Anjou captured. She had little time to worry about her former friends for the Tower of London now came under siege from Lancaster supporters and Jacquetta and her daughter Elizabeth the queen had to endure an attack on the Tower; it was defended by Jacquetta’s son, Anthony Woodville, who had returned from the battle of Tewkesbury to protect them. When Anthony Woodville led the counter-attack and the Lancastrian forces were defeated, Jacquetta was there to greet her royal son-in-law’s victorious progress into the city with the defeated queen, Margaret of Anjou, brought in as a captive in a triumphant parade.

  That night, the royal House of Lancaster was ended with the murder of Henry VI, either committed by Edward himself, his brothers, or by his friends or servants; certainly on his orders. Margaret of Anjou was held as a prisoner in England, firstly at the Tower and then at the home of her old friend Alice de la Pole, the Dowager Duchess of Suffolk, who had been her lady-in-waiting alongside Jacquetta when Margaret first came to England. Finally, in 1475, Margaret was released to her cousin Louis XI of France and returned to her home in Anjou.

  Jacquetta saw her son-in-law proclaimed king once more, and her daughter restored to her throne. She died the following year in 1472, at the age of fifty-six, a good age for a medieval woman, and a remarkable age for a woman who had survived two husbands, fourteen or more childbirths, and two wars. She had lived to see her daughter’s triumphant return to the throne, and she must have been confident that the safety of her daughter and grandchildren was assured, and the House of York firmly established as the royal family of England.

  She left an interesting legacy. Her love of books and learning was passed down to her son Anthony and to her daughter Elizabeth and they inherited the impressive library that her first husband, the Duke of Bedford, had willed to her. This was before the age of printing. These books would be hand-copied and, often, illustrated or illuminated manuscripts. Each one was a small work of art, and Jacquetta treasured them and passed them on to her children.

  Anthony may have loaned the precious volumes from this library to Sir Thomas Malory, a knight and an adventurer who used them to write his Morte d’Arthur, the first version written in English of the tales of Arthur and the Round Table. Malory was probably imprisoned, both by the Lancastrian court and then by the Yorkists, and his characters, though based on the traditional tale, may have been inspired by Jacquetta’s family and the optimism and glamour of the early years of the York–Woodville court that he briefly served.

  Anthony’s education, inspired and perhaps instructed by his mother, made him one of the first Renaissance men in Europe. He met William Caxton, who was pioneering the process of printing in Bruges, and invited him to England.

  A stained-glass window of c. 1475 of William Caxton presenting his first printed page to King Edward IV and his queen, Elizabeth Woodville

  Anthony Woodville sponsored the first ever published book in England, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and in 1477 Caxton published Anthony Woodville’s own translation Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (Sayings of the Philosophers). Caxton is said to have been surprised that Anthony did not include the traditional misogynistic complaints about women in the collection; perhaps we may see the influence of his redoubtable mother here also. Books from the Caxton press, including the Dictes, may have been given to the Prince of Wales, Edward, whose education was supervised by Anthony Woodville. Jacquetta’s daughter Elizabeth read the book in its early stages and suggested some editorial changes, and she may have been a patron of Caxton, commissioning him to translate The Book of the Knight of the Tower.

  This book has come into my hands at the request and desire of a noble lady who has brought forth many noble and fair daughters who have been raised and taught virtuously. Because of the great love she has always had for her fair children and still has, she wants them to know more about moral
behaviour so that they may always be virtuous themselves. To this end, she has asked me to translate this book out of French into our common English so it may be better understood by all who shall read it or hear it read. Therefore at the lady’s request and according to the small skill that God has sent me, I have endeavoured to obey her admirable wish.

  Perhaps the Woodville love of books and study can be traced down the generations to Henry VIII and his scholarly daughter Elizabeth I.

  Jacquetta had another darker legacy: the accusation of witchcraft that was first made explicit when the Earl of Warwick changed sides in 1469 and plotted to execute her. Rumours against the foreign-born descendant of the water goddess almost certainly preceded this accusation; but it was Warwick who openly accused her of witchcraft, and Warwick who ordered the trial at which the prosecution produced the little images of lead and witnesses who swore that she was a witch. Jacquetta escaped the normal punishment of death by strangling or burning, and cleared her name when Edward returned to the throne. But the accusation was repeated after Edward’s death by his youngest brother. Richard III set aside the York children’s claim to the throne which he usurped, on the basis that the marriage of their parents – Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville – was not legitimate, and that it had been brought about by magic. Though the marriage had been accepted by everyone for nearly twenty years, Richard accused his dead brother Edward of bigamously marrying Elizabeth in a false ceremony while he was already married to Lady Eleanor Butler. Richard’s claim was supported by Robert Stillington Bishop of Bath and Wells, but Lady Eleanor was, by then, dead. Richard also made the potent allegation that the marriage had been brought about by the magical craft of the witch Jacquetta and her daughter Elizabeth.