The Women of the Cousins’ War

by Philippa Gregory, David Baldwin

  Readers who would like to have a fuller account of Elizabeth’s life are referred to my Elizabeth Woodville: Mother of the Princes in the Tower, third edition, Stroud, 2010. The standard biography of her husband is Ross, C. Edward IV, 1974, while the most recent is the book of the same title by H. Kleineke, 2009. M. Hicks’s study, False, Fleeting, Perjur’d Clarence, Gloucester, 1980, remains the only life of George, Elizabeth’s elder brother-in-law, but Richard, the younger, has attracted much greater attention. P.M. Kendall’s Richard the Third, 1955, relies heavily on informed guesswork but is a great ‘popular’ biography, M. Hicks’s Richard III, Stroud, 2000, offers a valuable reassessment of its subject’s motives, and the present author’s biography of the King will be published in 2012. Hicks, M. Warwick the Kingmaker, Oxford, 1998, and Pollard, A.J. Warwick the Kingmaker: Politics, Power and Fame, 2007, have re-evaluated the life of Elizabeth’s other great antagonist, while H. Maurer has charted the career of her Lancastrian rival in Margaret of Anjou: Queenship and Power in Late Medieval England, 2003. Henry Tudor’s reign is assessed in S. Cunningham’s Henry VII, 2007, while M.K. Jones and M.G. Underwood tell the story of his mother Margaret Beaufort in The King’s Mother, 1993. The fate of the Princes in the Tower is the most famous of all historical mysteries, and two contrasting theories can be found in A. Wroe’s Perkin: A Story of Deception, 2003, and in my The Lost Prince, Stroud, 2007. For the Lambert Simnel rebellion and the battle of Stoke, see my Stoke Field: The Last Battle of the Wars of the Roses, Barnsley, 2006.

  A number of contemporary documents relating to Elizabeth have been printed. G. Smith has transcribed a fifteenth-century account of The Coronation of Elizabeth Wydeville, 1935; a description of her churching banquet held after the birth of Elizabeth of York can be found in The Travels of Leo of Rozmital, ed. & trans. M. Letts, Hakluyt Society, 2nd series, cviii, Cambridge, 1957; and The Record of Bluemantle Pursuivant (in Kingsford, C.L. English Historical Literature in the Fifteenth Century, Oxford, 1913), records the care she lavished on the welcome given to Louis de Gruthuyse when he visited England in 1472. Three of her letters survive, in The Stonor Letters and Papers, ed. C.L. Kingsford, 2 vols, 1919, in The Paston Letters, ed. J. Gairdner, 6 vols, 1904, and in The Coventry Leet Book, ed. M.D. Harris, 4 parts, Early English Text Society, 1907–13; her will is transcribed in Nicolas, N.H. Testamenta Vetusta, 2 vols (1926), and an account of her funeral is included in Sutton, A.F. and Visser-Fuchs, L., with Griffiths, R.A. The Royal Funerals of the House of York at Windsor, Richard III Society, 2005.

  Useful articles, some of them based on original documents, are:

  Fahy, C. ‘The Marriage of Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville: a new Italian source’, English Historical Review, lxxvi (1961)

  Harrod, H. ‘Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s visit to Norwich in 1469’, Norfolk Archaeology 5 (1859)

  Myers, A.R. ‘The Household of Queen Elizabeth Woodville, 1466–7’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, I (1967–8)

  Scofield, C.L. ‘Elizabeth Wydevile in the Sanctuary at Westminster, 1470’, English Historical Review, xxiv (1909)

  Sutton, A.F. and Visser-Fuchs, L. ‘A “Most Benevolent Queen” Queen Elizabeth Woodville’s Reputation, her Piety and her Books’, The Ricardian x, 129 (1995)

  Sutton, A.F. and Visser-Fuchs, L. ‘The Cult of Angels in Late Fifteenth-Century England: An Hours of the Guardian Angel Presented to Queen Elizabeth Woodville’ in Women and the Book, ed. L. Smith and J.H.M. Taylor (1996)

  Sutton, A.F. and Visser-Fuchs, L. ‘The Device of Queen Elizabeth Woodville: A Gillyflower or Pink’, The Ricardian xi, 136 (1997)

  Sutton, A.F. and Visser-Fuchs, L. ‘The Entry of Queen Elizabeth Woodville over London Bridge, 24 May 1465’, The Ricardian xix (2009)

  MARGARET

  BEAUFORT

  1443–1509

  Michael Jones

  THE FAMILY STORY

  Lady Margaret Beaufort’s life is a dramatic and moving story of a woman in the late Middle Ages who never saw herself as a victim, someone who suffered greatly and bore terrible dangers yet fought like a tigress to advance the fortunes of her only son, Henry Tudor. When that son became Henry VII of England on 22 August 1485, after vanquishing his rival Richard III in battle at Bosworth, it was as much Margaret’s triumph as the king’s. Margaret was courageous, intelligent and astute, a formidable plotter during the Wars of the Roses, a woman whose deep personal piety never interfered with her political pragmatism. She was strong-willed and ambitious and reached the pinnacle of her power and influence during the reign of her son, when she was known simply as ‘the King’s Mother’.

  Lady Margaret Beaufort was born on 31 May 1443, the only child and heiress of John Beaufort Duke of Somerset and his wife Margaret Beauchamp of Bletsoe. Margaret was born into a major aristocratic family, closely related to the ruling Lancastrian dynasty, a guarantee of social pre-eminence and landed wealth. Indeed, her father – one of Henry VI’s military commanders – had been elevated to his dukedom two months before her birth, as he prepared to lead a major expedition to France in the closing stages of the Hundred Years’ War. But Margaret had no memory of him. Somerset’s campaign was a fiasco, and the duke returned home in disgrace, was banished from court and then – rumour had it – committed suicide, unable to brook his calamitous fall from favour. He died a day before Margaret’s first birthday and was buried with little ceremony in Wimborne Minster in Dorset.

  The story of Margaret’s father was a tragic one. John Beaufort was captured at the disastrous English defeat at Baugé in 1421, when Henry V’s younger brother Thomas Duke of Clarence impetuously attacked a much larger Franco-Scottish army during a raid into Anjou. Baugé was one of the worst English defeats in the Hundred Years’ War. The English commander’s behaviour was so reckless that a mutiny nearly broke out in his ranks. According to the chronicler John Hardyng, a number of the assembled English aristocrats began a heated discussion of Thomas’s impulsive decision even as his army began to form up, for the order to ride into battle had been issued during an early-evening banquet, when a supposed informer announced the proximity of a French army, reinforced by a large contingent of Scottish soldiers (who were fighting as their allies, against the English). Halfway through a meal, Thomas believed he had a chance to surprise and overwhelm his foes – and, throwing all caution to the wind, commanded his surprised followers to saddle up, and led a mounted charge in the direction of his opponents.

  However, the full English army was not ready to go into battle and Thomas rode off at speed without his archers, who formed the majority of his raiding force and whose dreaded longbow had been one of the principal reasons for Henry V’s stupendous victory against the French at Agincourt in 1415, some six years earlier. Thomas had not been present at that great battle: he had contracted dysentery during the siege of Harfleur, and – like many others in the English army – had been forced to return home. This clearly rankled with him, and on the spur of the moment Thomas now decided that he would win a victory even greater than that of Henry V.

  In Agincourt’s aftermath, some of the French nobility had taunted the victors that the English aristocracy was no match for them, and had won only because of their reliance on a mass of peasant soldiers and a killing weapon that had no chivalric merit. This was desperate stuff, for the French had been out-generalled and out-fought at Agincourt, and Henry V had cleverly used his archers as part of a highly effective battle plan. But Thomas let this slight by the enemy go to his head, refusing to wait for his archers to form up behind him, and instead charging off into the gathering gloom with only a mounted force of knights accompanying him. Margaret’s father, John Beaufort, was one of his unfortunate companions.

  John Beaufort, who at this stage held the title and rank of Earl of Somerset, had a grandstand view of the débâcle that followed, for the English commander was his stepfather. After the death of his own father in 1410, his mother, Margaret Holland, had remarried Duke Thomas and her Beaufort children had been brought
up in the duke’s own household. John would have been riding in Thomas’s personal retinue, close to his stepfather, pell-mell towards the village of Baugé, across ground that had not been properly reconnoitred and towards an army of whose size and strength the English were entirely ignorant. What his thoughts were during this twilight charge can only be imagined.

  Tragically for the Beaufort family, the course of battle that followed was all too predictable. Thomas Duke of Clarence careered across a shallow river and into the village of Baugé, where fighting with a surprised Scottish advance guard flared up around the church and principal buildings. Part of Thomas’s small force then pushed on to the ridge above the village. By now the alarm had been raised and a much larger army of French and Scots had gathered to meet them. The English had lost any semblance of battle formation and were rapidly overwhelmed. Duke Thomas was killed and most of his aristocratic followers captured, John Beaufort among them. It was an utter disaster.

  Our modern understanding of battles is very much an analytical one, based on a study of the strategy and tactics of the rival commanders and their grasp of logistics and planning. A medieval audience would have seen things rather differently, for to them a battle was very much a trial by combat and its result a judgement from God on the merits of each side. A calamitous battle was a source of stigma, just as a resounding victory was a source of pride and affirmation. The battle of Baugé, in 1421, left a troubling legacy for the Beaufort family, just as the battle of Wakefield, in 1460, bequeathed a similarly disturbing one to the House of York, many years later. The image it held – reflected in poetry composed within the family circle – was one of fortune’s wheel, a wheel that could raise those astride it to power, influence, wealth and the zenith of success, then suddenly turn, casting those at its top to the ground in a complete and bewildering fall from grace.

  Margaret’s father was now a prisoner of war and would remain one for the next seventeen years. This was an exceptionally long period of imprisonment for a nobleman to endure. Initially, there were hopes for his speedy release, but all negotiations came to nothing. There was a particular reason for this. Beaufort fell into the hands of the French House of Eu, who bought his rights from his original captor, a Scottish captain. Buying and selling of ransom rights was a lucrative source of profit during the Hundred Years’ War, very much in the way that successful commodities trading is now. But the House of Eu wanted John Beaufort in order to arrange a prisoner swap, an exchange between John and the head of their own family, Charles Count of Eu, who had been captured by the English at Agincourt.

  In normal circumstances this would have been brought about easily and quickly. But Henry V in his will of 1422 – drawn up shortly before his death at the château of Vincennes – forbade the release of either Eu or another French aristocrat, Charles Duke of Orléans, until they recognised the Treaty of Troyes, the settlement that vested the rights to the kingdoms of England and France on the House of Lancaster. This veto effectively blocked Eu’s release, and doomed Margaret’s father to an equally lengthy period of captivity.

  These political factors were important. They overrode chivalric convention, which believed it unreasonable to place additional obstacles in the way of a nobleman’s release. John Beaufort had every reason to feel aggrieved. He grew into manhood and middle age as an exile and captive. Among the many documents concerning his ransom negotiations one stands out. It is dated in the year 1427 and concerns his fresh hopes for a prisoner exchange, one between Beaufort and John Duke of Bourbon, who had also been captured by the English at Agincourt. John Beaufort was dispatching a messenger to the English government, appealing for a speedy release of the Duke of Bourbon. His missive had been drawn up by a clerk, and was clearly and carefully formulated. But as the messenger was about to ride off, Beaufort was overcome with emotion. Hastily he scrawled a postscript in his own hand, pleading, almost begging for his freedom. But once again negotiations broke down and nothing came of his desperate appeal.

  John Beaufort endured the longest term of imprisonment of any English aristocrat in the Hundred Years’ War. According to his own statement, his captivity ruined his health and left him burdened with crippling debt. Over the years, as his hopes of release were continually dashed, his outlook became bitter and disillusioned. The impasse over his ransom was eventually broken through the personal intervention of Henry VI, who overturned the restriction of his late father and authorised Eu’s release, an act of clemency that at last ensured Beaufort regained his freedom.

  Henry VI disagreed with the war policy Henry V had so dramatically begun at Agincourt and continued with the conquest of Normandy, and was now seeking an end to the Hundred Years’ War through a negotiated peace treaty. His willingness to release the Count of Eu – and the Duke of Orléans two years later – signalled a break with the past. It was an act of kindness remembered with particular gratitude by Margaret Beaufort, who believed that Henry VI had saved her father from almost certain death in captivity and who as a result revered the Lancastrian King throughout her life.

  However, by the time of his release in the autumn of 1438, John Beaufort was an angry man, intent on recouping the large ransom that he had been forced to pay. His marriage in 1442 to Margaret Beauchamp of Bletsoe was a relatively humble one for an aristocrat of his standing – a further consequence of his long captivity in France, for when he finally came home there were no suitable candidates for a man of his rank, which infuriated him still further. Margaret Beauchamp was quickly made pregnant, and subsequently saw little of her new husband as he returned to France as a Lancastrian commander with the sole intention of amassing as much profit as possible. Henry VI was generous, granting Beaufort a stream of lands and offices, and in 1443 he was given a major new command, to lead a substantial army into territory held by the Valois regime of Charles VII and bring the French to battle.

  Much was hoped from this new military initiative. Charles VII had roused himself from the lethargy of his early years and was now conducting his affairs with energy and purpose. In 1442 he had led an expedition into English-held Gascony. The new campaign was intended to be a decisive rejoinder to this Valois revival. Henry VI invested more than £26,000 in Beaufort’s expedition, more than half his annual income, at a time when the Lancastrian regime was becoming increasingly short of money. Beaufort negotiated long and hard with the king, demanding a host of lands, titles and offices in England and France. His rewards were lavish, and included promotion to the dukedom of Somerset.

  But Beaufort wanted to recoup even more of his ransom. He showed little ability or skill in his command, for – after sailing from Portsmouth to Cherbourg with his army – he quite incredibly made no effort to liaise with the English commander already in Normandy, Richard Duke of York, a course of action that caused Duke Richard considerable offence. The chronicler Thomas Basin was in Rouen at the time Beaufort’s army landed in the duchy, and he reported a joke current among Lancastrian captains: the purpose of the expedition had become so secret, it was said, that its commander was no longer aware of it himself. Richard Duke of York, the king’s lieutenant in France, was reduced to sending out a stream of messengers trying to find out where the new army actually was.

  However, the sole purpose of Beaufort’s meandering raid into French territory in 1443 was to fill his own coffers with plunder and loot. He created a diplomatic incident by entering the territory of the neutral duchy of Brittany, besieging its frontier town of La Guerche and then forcing the Breton duke to pay him a substantial sum of money to lift the siege, an abuse of power and office so flagrant that it enraged even the placid Henry VI. Despite being fully paid for his war transport, Beaufort demanded additional payments from all the Norman towns that he passed through, again provoking a storm of protest – his levying of illegal taxes was later the subject of a full government inquiry. No meaningful military success was garnered from his campaign, and – to add insult to injury – Beaufort disbanded his troops early and pocketed the remai
nder of their wages.

  John Beaufort’s conduct provoked outrage, and when he returned home he met with an exceptionally hostile reception. An infuriated Henry VI banished him from court and ordered a full investigation by the English treasury of his financial malpractice. According to the Croyland Chronicle, a well-informed contemporary source whose author knew Beaufort personally, the gravity of his wrongdoing now hit home. Keenly feeling his disgrace, and unable to bear it any longer, John Beaufort committed suicide on 30 May 1444, almost a year after Margaret’s birth.

  The tomb of Margaret’s father, John Beaufort Duke of Somerset, at Wimborne Minster in Dorset. The legacy of this disgraced war commander and suicide was a deeply troubling one, but it fuelled Margaret’s powerful ambition, and she constructed this memorial during the reign of her son, Henry VII