Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  For wit thee well, it is a paradise

  To see this flower when it begins to spread

  With colours fresh enewed, white and red.

  Although by the standards of courtly love poetry this was tame stuff, there were inevitably those who suggested there was something more than friendliness between the girl in her teens and the man in his late forties—and those who saw in the ostensible betrayal of England’s king the betrayal of England as a country. More than a century later, the scandalous rumors were still sufficiently in currency that Shakespeare has Suffolk, on their first meeting in France, falling for Marguerite’s beauty before he learns her identity. But even Shakespeare’s Suffolk mixes self-interest with sexual attraction, hoping to rule the king through Marguerite, and in reality the queen had become notably close not only to the duke but also to his wife the duchess (born Alice Chaucer, granddaughter of the poet), which surely argues against an affair.

  Suffolk had not been the only man among the king’s advisers to support the French marriage. It also had the support of Cardinal Beaufort, the king’s great-uncle and one of the men who had governed the country before he came of age. Beaufort shared Suffolk’s personal regard for Marguerite, and she also enjoyed the support of the cardinal’s relatives, including the more immediate family of another soon-to-be-prominent Lancastrian, the young Margaret Beaufort.

  Other powerful figures, however, had been against the marriage—notably the Duke of Gloucester, the king’s uncle, who had welcomed Marguerite so lavishly along her route to London. In many ways, his was the voice of the Francophobe English people.

  All too soon, within weeks of Marguerite’s arrival and coronation, the question of England’s ceding Maine and Anjou in France came to a head. As word of Henry’s secret, and as yet unfulfilled, promise leaked out, angry talk centered on the rumor that Henry had been persuaded to cede the territories at “the request of his wife.” As one angry reporter, Dr. Thomas Gascoigne, put it later, “That aforesaid queen of ours begged the King of England that [the lands] so be given to her father at the urging of William [de la] Pole, duke of Suffolk, and his wife”—Alice Chaucer again—“who earlier had promised to request it.” Partisan though Gascoigne may have been, his was but one voice among many railing against the new queen.

  In a sense, Gascoigne was right; Marguerite does seem to have agitated for the English withdrawal. In a letter written before the end of 1445 to the king of France, her uncle, Marguerite promised, “And as to the deliverance which you desire to have of the Comte of Maine, and other matters contained in your said letters, we understand that my said lord has written to you at considerable length about this: and yet herein we will do for your pleasure the best that we can do.” A letter of Henry’s own volunteers to give up territory in Maine, at least partly because of “our dear and well-beloved companion the queen, who has requested us to do this many times.” But Marguerite’s efforts need not be read as a betrayal of her new kingdom, for wasn’t reconciliation, urging the peace, what a queen was supposed to do? Even the pageants had said so.

  Marguerite herself, while badgering Henry, had been under sustained pressure from her relatives in France to achieve the promised release of Maine and Anjou, neither the first nor the last princess, of course, to suffer such a clash of loyalties.* Popular blame for England’s predicament fell largely on the head of Suffolk, the official negotiator of the marriage deal, but the controversy did not help Marguerite’s popularity.

  Neither did the enmity of the old Duke of Gloucester. As Polydore Vergil wrote later, the queen determined herself to take over the important role Gloucester had once played in forming Henry’s opinions, “lest she also might be reported to have little wit who would suffer her husband, now of mature years, to be under another man’s government.” This, however, came close to crossing a dangerous boundary. Christine de Pizan had urged that a wife’s task should always be to preserve “the honour of her husband,” and Marguerite was trying to protect her husband’s reputation. But her determined entry into the fray wound up aligning her with one of the two major court parties. This was unacceptable—in England, though not in France. In the French court, faction was the modus operandi, and it was normal for the crown to align itself with one or another party. The monarchy in England, on the other hand, was supposed to be above such disputes.

  The difficult relationship between England and France underpinned the first years of Marguerite of Anjou’s queenship—it was both the reason for her presence in England and the source of her troubles there. The fallout from the long dispute also dominated the lives of women from the English families on either side of the political divide.

  _______________

  *The letter s was used for shillings and the letter d for pennies.

  **A more generous payment of 3l 6s 4d was made to John Fouke, perhaps understandably. The galleyman was ordered to take charge of one of Marguerite’s wedding presents—a lion.

  *Ferdinand of Aragon would find an unusual solution in designating his daughter Catherine of Aragon as his official ambassador at the court of her father-in-law, Henry VII.

  2

  “THE RED ROSE AND THE WHITE”

  The red rose and the white are on his face,

  The fatal colours of our striving houses

  HENRY VI, PART 3, 2.5

  In 1445, the year Marguerite arrived in England, none of the other six women who are central to this story were yet major players on the national scene. Indeed, neither Anne Neville nor Margaret of Burgundy had been born, let alone Elizabeth of York. Elizabeth Woodville—about eight years old, though no one had bothered to record her precise date of birth—was growing up in country obscurity.

  Only two others of the group showed any hint of their future prominence, and only one, Cecily Neville, was a woman of full maturity. Margaret Beaufort, meanwhile, was just a toddler, though her bloodline meant she was already a significant figure—a prize for whom others would compete. As an important carrier of the Lancastrian claim, she (or, rather, any son she might bear) might be considered as possible heir presumptive to the throne, until children came to her kinsman Henry VI.

  Margaret Beaufort had been born in 1443 at Bletsoe in Bedfordshire, to a comparatively obscure widow who already had children by her first husband, Sir Oliver St. John. Margaret’s father, however, was the Earl (later Duke) of Somerset, and from him she inherited a debatable but intriguing relationship to the throne.

  Somerset’s father, the first Earl of Somerset, had been a son of John of Gaunt, the first Lancastrian forebear. Although the first Earl of Somerset had been born to Gaunt’s mistress Katherine Swynford, Gaunt’s nephew Richard II confirmed by binding statute that all the children of the pair were rendered legitimate by their subsequent marriage and were able to inherit dignities and estates “as fully, freely, and lawfully as if you were born in lawful wedlock.” When John of Gaunt’s eldest son (by his first wife, Blanche of Lancaster) seized Richard’s throne and had himself declared Henry IV, this first Earl of Somerset thus became half brother to the king. But when in 1407 Somerset requested a clarification of the position laid down in that earlier legitimation, the resultant letters patent (a less binding form of documentation than a statute) confirmed his entitlement to estates and noble rank with one very crucial exception: “excepta dignitate regali”—excepting the dignities of the crown.

  Margaret from her very birth thus occupied an equivocal position. Less controversially, she was also heiress to great lands. But by the time of her birth, the anomalies of her family’s position—royal, but yet possibly excluded from ruling—had been further compounded by her father’s checkered career.

  Somerset’s life had been blighted by the accident that had him captured as a young man in the wars with France and held captive there for seventeen long years. When he returned to England only a few years before Margaret’s birth, he set about trying to assume the position to which he felt his blood entitled him—but, as the author of the Cr
owland Abbey chronicles put it, “his horn was exalted too greatly on high.” In 1443 his closeness in blood to a king short of relatives had seen Somerset appointed to lead England’s army in fresh wars against the French. The campaign was a disaster, and Somerset was summoned home in disgrace, his daughter having been born while he was away. Only a few months later, in May 1444, he died, the Crowland chronicler asserting (“it is generally said”) that he had committed suicide—a heinous sin in the fifteenth-century Catholic Church. The rumors surrounding his death only added to the dubiousness of the baby Margaret’s position, and perhaps later increased her well-documented insecurities.

  Somerset’s brother Edmund, who succeeded to the title, was able to ensure that the Beaufort family retained their influence, not least because of the friendship he would strike up with the new queen. It was this friendship that would bring him into conflict with the Duke of York, and York’s wife, Cecily.

  Born in 1415, the beautiful Cecily Neville (nicknamed the “Rose of Raby” for the castle where she entered the world) was the daughter of Ralph Neville, the powerful Earl of Westmorland, by his second marriage to Joan Beaufort—Beaufort, as in Margaret Beaufort’s notably Lancastrian family. Cecily would later become the matriarch of the ruling house of York, but in 1445 those fateful political divisions had not fully taken shape, and in fact Cecily’s father had originally supported the Lancastrian usurpation by John of Gaunt’s son Henry IV.

  Indeed, while Margaret Beaufort’s royal blood made her line a potential pathway to the throne, Cecily’s connection was even more direct. Joan Beaufort was daughter to John of Gaunt by Katherine Swynford, and one wonders if Cecily, John of Gaunt’s granddaughter, would not in later years come to find it galling that Margaret Beaufort could be regarded as inheriting John of Gaunt’s Lancastrian claim when she was only his great-granddaughter. The vital difference was that although Margaret herself was just as much a female as Cecily, her claim had come through her father and her father’s father, by way of the male line. Unlike Cecily, Margaret’s connection to John of Gaunt was through one of his sons, not his daughter.

  By the time Cecily was born in May 1415, the Neville family was enormous. Joan Beaufort had made a first marriage with a mere knight and borne two daughters, and when she married Ralph, he had a large family already; nevertheless, he and Joan had ten more surviving children. By contrast Cecily’s husband, Richard of York, had just one sister. His marriage would bring him an almost unparalleled number of in-laws, who in the fifteenth century figured as potentially trustworthy allies and were perhaps to be considered more a blessing than a curse. Certainly, the Nevilles would—in many ways, and for many years—do Richard proud.

  Richard had been born in 1411, grandson to Edward III’s fourth son, Edmund. In 1415 his father (another Richard) was executed for his involvement in a plot against Henry V. The young boy eventually became Ralph Neville’s ward. By that time, Richard had inherited the dukedom of York from a childless uncle, and in the years ahead another childless uncle died, leaving Richard heir to the great Welsh and Irish lands of the Mortimer family.

  Whether or not there was already any thought that he might also be king in waiting, York was an undoubted catch, and it was inevitable Ralph Neville would hope to keep this rich matrimonial prize within his own family. York’s betrothal to Cecily took place just a year after he came into the Nevilles’ care. The following year, Ralph himself died, but York’s wardship passed into the hands of Cecily’s mother, Joan. Full, consummated marriage would have been legal when Cecily was twelve, in 1427, and had certainly taken place by 1429, when permission was received from the papacy for them jointly to choose a confessor.

  In medieval terms, Cecily was lucky. She would have known Richard well, and he was only four years her elder. And since Richard, like Joan, had moved south, into the glittering world of the royal court, it seems probable Cecily would have done so, too—unless we are to deduce separations from the fact that their first child was not born until ten years into the marriage, though after that they came with notable frequency.

  Cecily gave birth to that first child—a daughter, Anne—in 1439 and a first son, Henry, in February 1441, at Hatfield. But the baby Henry soon died, so it was just as well, perhaps, that Cecily had the distraction of an imminent move to France that summer. York had been appointed governor of the English territories there, a swath of land still haunted by the specter of Joan of Arc, the holy maid, burned there by the English occupiers only a decade before. In Rouen, the capital of English Normandy, the couple set up home in a state so nearly regal that an officer of the household had to be appointed to overlook Cecily’s expenditures: lavishly jeweled dresses and even a cushioned privy. Their second son, Edward, the future Edward IV, was born there in April 1442; another son, Edmund, in May 1443; and another daughter, Elizabeth, the following year.

  At the time, there seems to have been no whisper of the future rumors concerning Edward’s paternity. But in the years ahead, there would be debate about the precise significance of the date of Edward’s birth, about where his father had been nine months before it, and about the hasty and modest ceremony in which he was christened. It is true that Edward was christened in a private chapel in Rouen Castle, while his next sibling, Edmund, was christened in the far more public arena of Rouen Cathedral—but that may have meant no more than that the child Edward seemed sickly, an explanation that would be all the likelier, of course, if he were indeed premature. It is true, too, that whereas Edward, the “Rose of Rouen,” was notably tall and as physically impressive as his grandson Henry VIII, Richard of York was dark and probably small. But perhaps Edward simply took after his mother, Cecily, several of whose other children would also be tall.

  The basic fact remains that York himself showed no sign of querying his son’s paternity. Indeed, he and the English government proposed and sustained lengthy negotiations for a match between Edward and a daughter of the French king, which hardly suggests suspicion about his status. This was not, moreover, the first time an allegation of bastardy had been leveled at a royal son born abroad: John of Gaunt, born in Ghent, had been called a changeling. In the years ahead, Cecily’s relationship with Richard of York would give every sign of being notably close and strong. And there is the question of the identity of her supposed lover—an archer called Blaybourne. For a woman as conscious of her status as Cecily—the woman who would be called “proud Cis”—that seems especially unlikely. There are certainly queries as to how the story spread. The Italian Dominic Mancini, visiting England years later at a time when it had once again become a matter of hot debate, said that Cecily herself started the idea when angered by Edward. A continental chronicler has it relayed by Cecily’s son-in-law Charles of Burgundy. But sheer political expedience apart, it was not at all uncommon for women in this era—even, and perhaps especially, the highborn—to be slurred through their sexual morality.

  Certainly, Cecily was still queening it in Rouen as Duchess of York when, in the spring of 1445, the young Marguerite of Anjou passed through the city on her way to England and marriage with Henry VI. It may have been here that the thirty-year-old woman and the fifteen-year-old girl struck up a measure of friendship that would survive their husbands’ future differences—one example among many of women’s alliances across the York-Lancastrian divide. But at this point Marguerite’s role was far the grander, albeit beset with difficulty.

  3

  “A WOMAN’S FEAR”

  If it be fond, call it a woman’s fear;

  Which fear, if better reasons can supplant,

  I will subscribe, and say I wronged the duke.

  HENRY VI, PART 2, 3.1

  When Marguerite of Anjou had arrived in England, her recent acquaintance, Cecily, was not far behind her. In that autumn of 1445, Cecily’s husband’s term of office in France came to an end. Richard and Cecily had returned to England and settled down. Another daughter, Margaret (the future Margaret of Burgundy), was born to the Yorks in May 14
46, probably at Fotheringhay, while the two eldest boys were likely to have been given their own establishment, at Ludlow. But the couple were now embittered and less wealthy, since the English government had never properly covered their expenses in Normandy.

  York had hoped to be appointed for another spell of office but was balked, not least by Cardinal Beaufort and his nephew Somerset. It was this, one chronicler records, that first sparked the feud between York and the Beauforts, despite the fact that the latter were Cecily’s mother’s family. The Burgundian chronicler Jean de Waurin sheds some light on this, writing that Somerset “was well-liked by the Queen. . . . She worked on King Henry, on the advice and support of Somerset and other lords and barons of his following, so that the Duke of York was recalled to England. There he was totally stripped of his authority.” York had now a long list of grievances, dating back a decade to the time when a sixteen-year-old Henry VI had begun his own rule without giving York any position of great responsibility.

  York belonged to the “hawks” among the country’s nobility, who believed in pursuing an aggressive policy against France. So too did the king’s uncle, the aging Humfrey of Gloucester. By the autumn of 1446, King Charles was demanding the return of ever more English holdings in France, and Henry VI, under Marguerite’s influence, was inclined to grant it. But Humfrey, who would be a powerful opponent of the policy, would have to be gotten out of the way in order for the deal to go through. In February 1447—under, it was said, the aegis of Marguerite, Suffolk, and the Beaufort faction—Gloucester was summoned to a Parliament at Bury St. Edmunds, only to find himself arrested by the queen’s steward and accused of having spread rumors that Suffolk was Marguerite’s lover. He was allowed to retire to his lodgings while the king debated his fate, but there, twelve days later, he died. The cause of his death has never been established to this day, and though it may well have been natural, inevitably rumors of murder crept in—rumors, even, that Duke Humfrey, like Edward II before him, had been killed by being “thrust into the bowel with a hot burning spit.”