Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  In the churchyard of St. Margaret’s, where the peers assumed their robes, the body was once again censed and then borne into the abbey shoulder high for the first of many more religious services. Elizabeth rested for the duration of the Dirige—conducted by the abbot and nine bishops—and then Lady Katherine, escorted by her nephew the Marquis of Dorset and by the Earl of Derby, led the lords and the ladies to a supper of fish in the Queen’s Great Chamber. Watched that night in the abbey by her ladies and men of all ranks, lit by hundreds more heavy tapers, Elizabeth’s corpse waited for the next day. Body and soul could not be left unprotected through the dark night hours: each one of those tapers might serve to drive a demon away.

  The long list of services offered for the dead woman reflects the importance of church rites in the daily life of the fifteenth century. Lauds were said at six the next morning, followed by Our Lady’s Mass at seven, the Mass of the Trinity, and then the requiem mass. As the ceremony moved toward its close, the mourners, in order of precedence, laid more lengths of costly fabric across the effigy. The blue and green, the bright strands of metal in the weave, would have stood out against the funereal scene. After the sermon, the ladies left for men to do the physical work of burial. The queen’s chamberlain and ushers broke their staves of office and cast them into the grave with ritual tears, in token that their service to Elizabeth of York was ended. Perhaps the emotion was real—Elizabeth had been a gentle mistress and loyal to those who served her and her family.

  The manuscript description of Elizabeth’s funeral details a lavish distribution of alms after the funeral: money given to “bed-rid folks, lazars, blind folks,” to churches, to hospitals, to charitable foundations. And, all in all, with more than nine thousand yards of black cloth coming out of the great wardrobe, King Henry handed out “the greatest livery of black gowns that ever was seen in our day.” Elizabeth’s funeral had cost some three thousand pounds, twice that of her father’s and five times that of her eldest son’s. Henry must indeed have loved her, even though he had taken great pains to deny that her bloodline was the source of his political legitimacy.

  As was customary for a female corpse, the funeral had been a predominantly female ceremony—partly because the one mourned was a woman, and partly because concern for the dead was always first a female duty. But those women who were not there are almost as interesting as those who were. Queen Elizabeth was survived by four of her sisters, though only two are recorded as having been present. Absent also were Elizabeth’s young daughters, her husband, and her surviving son, Prince Henry. The royal family did not attend funerals; it was as though this most carefully protected family in the country feared that death itself might prove contagious.

  Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was likewise absent, though her husband, Thomas Stanley, Earl of Derby, had ridden immediately ahead of the bier and had escorted Lady Katherine to the Westminster supper. Perhaps Margaret was with the king, the son she adored, to comfort him in privacy. Perhaps, simply, she was at her home of Collyweston in Northamptonshire, having been unable to journey so fast along the sodden winter roads. Or perhaps it was that My Lady the King’s Mother had always claimed status almost equal to that of the queen herself. If royalty did not attend funerals, then neither would she.

  Rather than presenting herself at the funeral, Margaret occupied herself in laying down a set of ordinances for royal mourning to be used for any future deaths—prescribing precisely the court’s costume and comportment, “apparel for princesses and great estates,” moving down the scale in their order. A queen was to wear a surcoat with a train before and behind; the king’s mother (though Margaret was technically only a countess) was “to wear in every thing like to the queen.”

  It was said, too often for it to be wholly a lie, that Margaret’s concern for rank and dominance came between her and Elizabeth; if so, they were not the only mother- and daughter-in-law to have had problems in our story. Elizabeth’s own mother, Elizabeth Woodville—the beautiful widow who had captured the heart of King Edward IV—had been bitterly resented by Edward’s mother, Cecily Neville. Mother also to Richard III, Cecily had been the matriarch of the Yorkist clan, just as Margaret Beaufort was a leader of the Lancastrian. Both were mothers of kings who could never quite forget that Fortune had snatched their own queen’s crowns away. Cecily’s youngest daughter, Margaret, was living in Burgundy, but as the sister of two Yorkist monarchs, her determination to take a hand in the affairs of England had never quite disappeared.

  Poor Anne Neville, Richard III’s wife, had been too shadowy a figure to have quarreled with her mother-in-law. But the seventh woman in our story had quarreled with half the world and—in political terms, at least—had been the most potent of all the ghosts hovering around Elizabeth of York’s head as she had lain awaiting burial. This was Marguerite of Anjou, Henry VI’s wife and the Lancastrian queen under whose determined rule the “Wars of the Roses,” the civil wars that reshaped British history in the mid- to late fifteenth century, first got under way.

  The events that caused the Wars of the Roses and finally brought into being the Tudor dynasty were above all a family saga—a “Cousins’ War,” as the conflict is also known.* Indeed, although the white rose was indeed a popular symbol for the house of York, one line of descendants from the ruling Plantagenet family, the red rose was never widely identified with their opponents in the house of Lancaster until the moment when Henry VII, poised to take over the country, sought an appropriate and appealing symbol. And in some ways, moreover, the attractive iconography of the two roses does the real history a disservice, encouraging us to look no further than the idea of a neat two-party, York-Lancaster divide.

  The “Cousins’ War” is a more accurate name, since all the protagonists were bound together by an infinite number of ties. And rather than a series of clear-cut disputes, these conflicts should really be seen in terms of politics, in all its many shades of gray, and with its secret alliances, queasy coalitions, public spin and private qualms, and marriages of convenience in the political as well as the literal senses. It was an era in which positions were under constant readjustment and alliances changed from day to day.

  One affiliation, however, was shared on both sides of the struggle. Both houses claimed descent from the last undisputed king of England, who when the wars erupted had been dead for nearly eighty years. He had been the powerful and prolific Edward III, one of the long line of Plantagenet kings who had ruled England since the Norman Conquest. But in 1377 Edward was succeeded by his grandson (the son of his dead eldest son), the ten-year-old Richard II. Richard was deposed in 1399 by his cousin, Shakespeare’s “Bolingbroke,” who became Henry IV and was succeeded by his son Henry V, who in turn was succeeded by his son, Henry VI. This so-called Lancastrian line (Henry IV’s father, John of Gaunt, had been created Duke of Lancaster) would successfully hold the throne for more than a half century.

  There had, however, been an alternative line of succession lowering from the wings, in the shape of the Yorkists—descended, like the Lancastrians, from Edward III’s younger sons. The Yorkists had arguably a better claim than the Lancastrians (depending on how you felt about a woman’s ability to transmit rights to the throne), since while the Lancastrian progenitor, John of Gaunt, had only been Edward’s third son, the Yorkists were descended in the female line from his second son, Lionel, as well as in the male line from his fourth son, Edmund. From the beginning, then, the dispute between the Lancastrians and Yorkists hinged as much upon the women in both families—mothers, daughters, sisters, and wives—as it did upon the men who vied for the throne.

  The circle of women behind the conflicts and resolutions of the late fifteenth century was locked into a web of loyalty and betrayal as intimate and emotional as that of any other domestic drama, albeit that in this dispute—almost literally a game of thrones—a kingdom was at stake. The business of their lives was power, their sons and husbands the currency. The machinations were those yo
u might see in the Mafia story The Sopranos, the stark events worthy of Greek tragedy. Cecily Neville had to come to terms with the fact that her son Edward IV had ordered the execution of his brother George, Duke of Clarence, and the suspicion that her other son, Richard III, had murdered his nephews, the so-called Princes in the Tower. Elizabeth Woodville is supposed to have sent her daughters to make merry at Richard III’s court while knowing that he had murdered her sons, those same princes. Elizabeth of York, as the decisive battle of Bosworth unfolded, could only await the results of what would prove a fight to the death between the man some say she had incestuously loved—her uncle Richard III—and the man she would in the end marry, Henry VII.

  The second half of the fifteenth century is, in the tales of conflicted maternity and monstrous births, alive with female energy. Yet the lives of the last Plantagenet women remain a subject comparatively unexplored by historians. The events of this turbulent time are usually described in terms of men, under a patriarchal assumption as easy as that which saw Margaret Beaufort give up her own blood right to the throne in favor of her son, Henry, or which saw Anne Neville, an important heiress, passed from one royal family to the other as though she were as insentient an object as any other piece of property.

  Of the seven women who form the backbone of this book, the majority have already been the subject of at least one biographical study, although these are still fewer than the drama of their lives might justify, and much of the work has tended to be academic in intent. (Popular history has traditionally preferred to deal in certainties that, for this period and this subject, tend to be in short supply.)

  The aim of this book, unlike those that have come before it, is to interweave these women’s individual stories and thereby trace the connections between them—connections that sometimes ran counter to the allegiances established by their men—and demonstrate the ways in which the patterns of their lives often echoed each other. It is also to attempt to understand their daily reality, to see what these women saw and heard (and read, smelled, and even tasted): the bruised feel of velvet under the fingertip, or the silken muzzle of a hunting dog; the discomfort of furred ceremonial robes on a scorching day, a girl’s ability to lose herself in reading a romantic story.

  These women and their contemporaries left many clues about their world: the stamping feet of the “maid that came out of Spain” (as the queen’s list of expenses put it) and danced before Elizabeth of York, and the roughened hands of Mariona, the laundress listed in Marguerite of Anjou’s accounts who kept the queen’s personal linen clean; the tales of Guenivere and Lancelot, popularized in these very years by a man who knew these women; the ideal of the virginal saints whose lives they studied so devotedly. To ignore these things is to treat history as disaster tourism—to focus (and admittedly, in the earlier years it sometimes seems inevitable) so exclusively on the wild roller-coaster ride of events as to get only a distorted picture, stripped of the context of daily problems and pleasures that must have altered the impact of the events to some degree.

  The attempt to tell the story of these years through women is beset with difficulties, greater even than those that face other historians of the notoriously challenging later fifteenth century. To insist that the women were equal players with the men, on the same stage, is to run the risk of claiming more than the facts can bear, but the only alternative might seem to be to accept the deal the women themselves apparently made (and generations of historians have followed) and chronicle them only through those men. We have to find some way of negotiating this rocky terrain, where reliance on the few known public facts seems almost to get in the way.

  We have to acknowledge the profound difference between their ideas and our own, and then, conversely, admit emotions we recognize: Elizabeth of York’s frantic desire to find a place in the world, Margaret Beaufort’s obsessive love for her son. We have to borrow from our own emotional reality, our own understanding of the world, to imagine how it felt to be flung quite as abruptly as these women were, up to the top point of the turn of Fortune’s Wheel, and then back down again, to take the wearying list of battles and grasp, emotionally, that although the tactics of the field are not the subject of this book, each one meant the worst loss of all for wives, daughters, mothers—women whose destinies would be decided, and perhaps unthinkably altered, in an arena they were not allowed even to enter. Only then can we attempt to approach these women and these years in another way.

  The women of the Cousins’ War should be legends, their names bywords. In a time not only of terror but of opportunity as well, the actions of these women would ultimately prove to matter as much as the battles in which cousin fought cousin. It had been the alliances and ambitions of these women that helped get that new world under way.

  They were the mothers and midwives of the Tudor dynasty—of modern England, you might say. The Tudors would rule England throughout the sixteenth century, and the reigns of monarchs like Henry VIII and his daughter Elizabeth I would see not only a great flowering of art and literature, adventures in trade and exploration, and the establishment of the Protestant religion in the country, but also a new sense of national identity.

  The Tudor age would also, of course, see—in Elizabeth I and her sister Mary—the first women to rule England, and Elizabeth in particular is one of the best-known characters in history. But even the Tudor wives of the early sixteenth century have a much higher profile than the Plantagenets in popular currency. Yet the stories of these other, earlier, figures are even more dramatic, riper with possibility—if we could but find the right way to tap it. For all that these women have often been hidden from history, it is possible to bring them center stage, as central as was Elizabeth of York, that February day.

  _______________

  *The name “Wars of the Roses” is variously credited to historian David Hume in the eighteenth century and novelist Sir Walter Scott in the nineteenth.

  PART I

  1445–1460 Lancaster

  1

  FATAL MARRIAGE

  O peers of England, shameful is this league,

  Fatal this marriage, cancelling your fame

  HENRY VI, PART 2, 1.1

  It was no way for a queen to enter her new country, unceremoniously carried ashore as though she were a piece of baggage—least of all a queen who planned to make her mark. In her later courage and conviction, her energy and her ruthlessness, Marguerite of Anjou would be in part what the times and the circumstances of her life in England had made her. But no doubt as she first set foot on the English shore on April 9, 1445, her character and ambition were already there to see.

  The ship that brought her across the Channel, the Cock John, had been blown off its expected course and so battered by storms as to have lost both its masts. Marguerite arrived, as her new husband, Henry VI, put it in a letter, “sick of ye labour and indisposition of ye sea.” Small wonder that the Marquess of Suffolk, the English peer sent to escort her, had to carry the seasick fifteen-year-old ashore. The people of Porchester, trying gallantly to provide a royal welcome, had heaped carpets on the beach, where the chilly April waves clawed and rattled at the pebbles, but Marguerite’s first shaky steps on English soil took her no farther than a nearby cottage, where she fainted. From there she was carried to a local convent to be nursed, making her first English impressions ones of sickrooms and austerity.

  This would be the woman Shakespeare, in Henry VI, Part 3, famously dubbed the “she-wolf” of France, her “tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide.” Italian chronicler Polydore Vergil, by contrast, would look back on her as “imbued with a high courage above the nature of her sex . . . a woman of sufficient forecast, very desirous of renown, full of policy, counsel, comely behaviour, and all manly qualities.” But then Vergil was writing for the Tudor king Henry VII, sprung of Lancastrian stock, and he would naturally try to praise the wife of the last Lancastrian king, the woman who would, in her later years, fight so hard for the Lancastrian cause. Marguerite
was, from the beginning, a controversial queen. Few queens of England have so divided opinion; few have suffered more from the propaganda of their enemies.

  Marguerite of Anjou was niece by marriage to the French king Charles VII, her own father, René, having been described as a man of many crowns but no kingdoms. He claimed the thrones of Naples, Sicily, Jerusalem, and Hungary as well as the duchy of Anjou in the region of the Loire Valley, titles so empty, however, that early in the 1440s he had settled in France, his brother-in-law’s territory. At the beginning of 1444, the English suggested a truce in the seemingly endless conflict between England and France known as the Hundred Years’ War, the temporary peace to be cemented by a French bride for England’s young king, Henry VI. Unwilling to commit his own daughters, Charles had proffered Marguerite as pledge. Many royal marriages were made to seal a peace with an enemy, the youthful bride as passive a potential victim as any princess of story. But in this case, the deal making was particularly edgy.

  In the hopes of finally ending the long hostilities, the mild-mannered Henry VI—so unfitting a son, many thought, to Henry V, the hero of Agincourt—had agreed not only to take his French bride virtually without dowry but also to cede allegiance of the territories Anjou and Maine in France, which the English had long occupied. Suffolk, as England’s negotiator, knew how unpopular this would be, but when he had sent home for instructions after receiving the French demands, Henry had sent word to accept them, a decision with which many of his advisers would disagree. Now, the weather seemed to echo English sentiment about the union. The thunder and lightning that greeted Marguerite’s arrival had been a repeated trope in the arrival of foreign royal brides, a disproportionate number of whom seem to have had a stormy passage across the sea. All the same, it seemed an ominous sign to contemporaries.