The Women of the Cousins’ War
Page 13
It was too good a story not to be repeated, and Jacquetta’s and Elizabeth’s reputations as seducers, social climbers and witches endure to this day. Like her mother, Elizabeth Woodville was slandered with accusations of magic, and linked to the legend of Melusina, the founder of the family of St Pol.
In conclusion, I have to wonder why the story of Jacquetta is so little known. I suppose that much of the history of this period is filtered through the pro-Tudor historians and their great playwright William Shakespeare. For them, the founding mother of the family had to be Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, and not his mother-in-law Elizabeth Woodville. The histories of Elizabeth Woodville and her mother Jacquetta were neglected in favour of the more conventional founding mother: Margaret Beaufort, whose courage and determination put her son on the throne and whose political astuteness led her to manage the writing of their history, and the exclusion of the rival family.
I think also that the lives of Jacquetta and her daughter make uncomfortable reading for historians who find accounts of female power, female sexuality and female magic disturbing. The bland, censored and very conventional accounts of Lady Margaret Beaufort are a more acceptable view of medieval women than the history of these adventurous, sexually active, ambitious women. And so it gives me pleasure to offer this brief essay as a reference point for readers who have met and loved Jacquetta in my novel The Lady of the Rivers and also as a starting point for the historical studies of Jacquetta Duchess of Bedford that I hope will follow.
Jacquetta’s signature
NOTES AND SOURCES
The famous call to arms is from Shakespeare, Henry V, Act 3, Scene i. Joan’s threat to Bedford is cited in Warner, M. Joan of Arc: the image of female heroism, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1981.
The Glendower and Hotspur conversation is in Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I, Act 3, Scene i. I am indebted to the owner of Penshurst, Viscount de L’Isle, for information about the building.
Jacquetta’s children are difficult to establish. I would suggest that she had fourteen pregnancies, of which thirteen children grew to adulthood. After lengthy discussions with David Baldwin in which we agreed principally that there is no definitive list (!) I would suggest this: Elizabeth, b. 1437, (Lewis, b. 1438, d. in infancy), Anne, b. 1439, Anthony, b. 1442, Mary, b. 1443, Jacquetta, b. 1444, John, b. 1445, Richard, b. 1446, Martha, b. 1450, Eleanor, b. 1452, Lionel, b. 1453, Margaret, b. 1454, Edward. b. 1455, Katherine (or Catherine) b. 1458.
The description of the trial of Eleanor Cobham and her associates is mostly drawn from Godwin, W. Lives of the necromancers: or, An account of the most eminent persons in successive ages, who have claimed for themselves, or to whom has been imputed by others, the exercise of magical power, London: F.J. Mason, 1834, and the very clear account by Jessica Freeman, ‘Sorcery at court and manor: Margery Jourdemayne, the witch of Eye next Westminster’, Journal of Medieval History, 30 (2004), 343–57. Shakespeare has a judgement scene with the king, Henry VI, taking part, though in fact he kept well away from proceedings: Henry VI, Part II, Act 2, Scene iii. Shakespeare thought it was Thomas Stanley, but it was, in fact, John.
The legend of the black dog which haunts Peel Castle and also Leeds Castle, where she was imprisoned, is still told: http://www.mysteriousbritain.co.uk/england/isle-of-man/legends/peel-castle.html. Margaret of Anjou’s gift records are interestingly analysed by Helen E. Maurer: Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England, Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003.
The celebrated joke against the rising Rivers is cited in The Paston Letters, AD 1422–1509, ed. J. Gairdner, 6 vols, iii (1904), 204, William Paston to his brother John, 28 January 1460; the joke against the Rivers arriving in Calais is in Gregory’s chronicle, cited Griffiths, R.A. The Reign of King Henry VI, Stroud: Sutton, 1998. The account of the abuse of the Rivers family by the Yorkist lords was told in the Paston letters; quoted here is the modernised spelling version from Griffiths, R.A. The Reign of King Henry VI, Stroud: Sutton, 1998.
The description of Henry VI under the control of the Earl of Warwick as more timorous than a woman comes from the contemporary observer Francesco Coppini CMiLP, 1 61 cited in Griffiths as above. The death of the Earl of Salisbury is quoted by Wolffe, B.P. Henry VI, London: Eyre Methuen, 1981.
The details of Jacquetta’s trial for witchcraft are recorded by the court that cleared her, in the Calendar of Patent Rolls 1467–77. A new edition of The Knight of the Tower, the book requested by Elizabeth Woodville, has been published: Barnhouse, R. The Book of the Knight of the Tower: Manners for Young Medieval Women, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
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ELIZABETH
WOODVILLE
1437/38–1492
David Baldwin
ELIZABETH’S EARLY LIFE
Elizabeth Woodville, the future ‘White Queen’, was probably born at Grafton in Northamptonshire in 1437 or early in 1438. We cannot be more precise because her parents’ whereabouts at the time of her birth are uncertain, and estimates of her age are based on a note added to a later portrait indicating that she was twenty-six when the original was painted in 1464. She was therefore almost certainly the eldest of the estimated fourteen children born to Sir Richard Woodville of Grafton and his wife, Jacquetta, Dowager Duchess of Bedford, a couple whose secret marriage in 1436 had surprised contemporaries almost as much as their daughter’s would outrage public opinion years later. Jacquetta, who had been married to John of Bedford, Henry V’s brother, and who ranked as England’s third lady after Henry IV’s second wife and Henry V’s widow, had been expected to give her hand to a great nobleman; and her choice of Sir Richard, a county knight with limited prospects, raised eyebrows in a society which thought that everyone should know his or her place.
Sir Richard was not without merit, however. His reputation as a soldier and jouster grew steadily in the early 1440s, and it would be unfair to assume that Jacquetta’s influence with Henry VI’s wife, Margaret of Anjou, was entirely responsible for his elevation to the peerage as Baron Rivers in 1448. The young couple could now enter fully into English noble society, but Jacquetta’s dower (her life interest in a third of her late first husband’s wealth) was steadily eroded by the loss of English-held lands in France at the end of the Hundred Years’ War and by the inability of the royal treasury to meet all the demands made upon it. Keeping up appearances and providing for a growing family on a reduced income was as problematic then as at any other time, and the young Elizabeth would have learned that money had to be spent carefully. Her surviving accounts indicate that she knew how to manage her finances, and her expenditure did not exceed her income even when queen.
What was life like for a young girl of good family growing up in the Northamptonshire countryside in the middle of the fifteenth century? Like most children, she probably found the regular religious services and polite formality tiresome (particularly when her parents were in attendance), but they were all part of learning how to conduct herself in a ‘proper’ manner. She would have been taught to ride and hunt – hunting was always a favourite pastime of the aristocracy – and her gentler accomplishments would have included needlework, dancing and perhaps singing. Medieval girls were not always well educated – the Paston Letters indicate that some young gentlewomen could barely sign their names – but Jacquetta was noted for her love of literature and her daughters may have fared rather well in this respect.
Long before Elizabeth reached marriageable age her parents would have concerned themselves with the question of whom she would marry. Local alliances were often forged in this manner, and it was agreed that she would wed John, son of Sir Edward Grey and his wife Elizabeth Lady Ferrers, a youth about five years her senior. She would not have been asked if she would like to marry John – her duty to her family came before her own personal feelings – and she was probably sent to live with her future husband and in-laws at Groby in Leicestershire some time before the wedding. The Tudor writer Thomas More thought that she was placed in service to Queen Margaret either now or later, but his ‘Elizabeth Grey’ was probably another lady with the same name. He may have confused Elizabeth with Margaret’s lady Isabella Grey (who was much older), or with an Elizabeth, the widow of Ralph Grey of Heaton, who was serving the queen in 1445.
We do not know when Elizabeth and John Grey were married, and references to the age of their eldest son, Thomas, are not very helpful. He is said to have been thirty-seven in 1492 in one document or thirteen in 1464 in another, and was therefore born either in 1455 or in 1451, when his mother would have been only thirteen or fourteen herself. This may seem unlikely, but Margaret Beaufort was only thirteen when she gave birth to her son, the future King Henry VII, and it may be another case of a marriage being consummated as early as possible. The Church held that a union was invalid unless both partners consented to it, and allowed children to opt out of whatever arrangements their parents had made for them when they reached puberty. Few did so in practice, but consummation effectively closed the window of opportunity and made the contract between the families secure.
The decade that Elizabeth spent as a young wife is all but lost to us, but her everyday life would not have been unlike that of other girls who found themselves in a similar situation. It is probable that she and John made their home on one of the Grey family’s subsidiary manors – perhaps Astley in Warwickshire or Bradgate in Leicestershire – and it was there that a second son, Richard, was born to them a few years later. Elizabeth would soon have become accustomed to giving instructions to servants and farm workers, and to planning ahead to ensure that her family was fed and clothed in all seasons. Most importantly of all, she would have taken John’s place when he was away on business or royal service, and dealt with disputes or anything that affected their joint interests. Such marriages may not have been founded on love – at least not to begin with – but they could be companionate and agreeable all the same.
These were some of the most peaceful – and perhaps also the happiest – years of Elizabeth’s life, but from time to time she would hear that there was trouble in high places and that the great men of the kingdom had come to blows. The first battle of the Wars of the Roses – at St Albans in 1455 – did not involve her husband, father or brothers directly, but they were almost bound to be drawn into the conflict as the situation worsened. We have already seen how, in January 1460, Lord Rivers, Jacquetta and their eldest son Sir Anthony were captured by the Earl of Warwick’s men at Sandwich, taken to Calais, and there given a thorough dressing-down by Warwick, the future Kingmaker, his father the Earl of Salisbury, and the Duke of York’s son, Edward Earl of March. Elizabeth would have been mortified when she learned of what had happened, but she could do nothing except hope that her parents’ and brother’s enemies would not harm them physically, and wonder whom she might ask to intercede for them. Warwick had given her cause to both fear and dislike him, and there would be other occasions as the years passed.
> Elizabeth’s father had been a member of the peerage for twelve years by this time, a year longer than Warwick, and Anthony was shortly to marry the heiress to the barony of Scales. But the abuse hurled at them at Calais turned on the notion that they were upstarts who lacked the older, more dignified, nobility of their critics rather than on their ‘misguided’ loyalty to Henry VI. This was, of course, a year before this same Edward Earl of March was proclaimed king as Edward IV and four years before he married Elizabeth Woodville and became Lord Rivers’s son-in-law. It would be interesting to know if they ever reminded one another of the occasion, and smiled grimly at the irony of it.
Garter Stall Plate of Richard Woodville, first Earl Rivers, Elizabeth’s father. St George’s Chapel, Windsor
Elizabeth was undoubtedly relieved when her parents and brother were released unhurt a little before or after the Yorkist victory at the battle of Northampton on 10 July, but worse was to follow. Her husband, Sir John Grey, was killed at the second battle of St Albans on 17 February 1461, and she found herself a widow with two young sons. John had led his servants and tenants to join Queen Margaret’s Lancastrian army as it moved southwards after its victory over the Yorkists at Wakefield in Yorkshire on 30 December, and it was almost certainly one of these men, breathless and dust-stained, who brought her the terrible news. The Earl of Warwick had deployed the southern Yorkist forces at St Albans, twenty miles from London, expecting an attack from the north, but Margaret and her commanders had surprised him by advancing from the northwest through Dunstable. Desertions had added to Warwick’s difficulties and he had been driven back and forced to abandon the battlefield, although not without a struggle that cost the lives of many loyal Lancastrians. John’s body would have been brought home and buried in the Grey family mausoleum at Astley, but no monument survives today.