Gloucester had been King Henry’s nearest male relative and therefore (despite his advanced age) his heir. His death promoted the disaffected York to that prominent, tantalizing position. The following month Cardinal Beaufort also died. The decks were being cleared, and the way was open for younger men—and women. Marguerite did not miss her opportunity.
Over the next few years, Marguerite could be seen extending her influence through her new English homeland, albeit often in a specifically female way. A letter from Margery Paston—a member of the Norfolk gentry family whose correspondence gives us so many insights into the era—tells of how when the queen was at Norwich, she sent for one Elizabeth Clere, “and when she came into the Queen’s presence, the Queen made right much of her, and desired her to have a husband.” Marguerite the matchmaker was also active for one Thomas Burneby, “sewer for our mouth,” telling the object of his attention (vainly, this time) that Burneby loved her “for the womanly and virtuous governance that ye be renowned of,” and writing to the father of another reluctant bride, sought by a yeoman of the Crown, that since his daughter was in his “rule and governance,” he should give his “good consent, benevolence and friendship to induce and excite your daughter to accept my said lord’s servant and ours, to her husband.” Other letters of hers request that her shoemaker might be spared jury service “at such times as we shall have need of his craft, and send for him” and that the game in a park where she intended to hunt “be spared, kept and cherished for the same intent, without suffering any other person there to hunt.”
For a queen to exercise patronage and protection—to be a “good lady” to her dependents—was wholly acceptable, and so many of Marguerite’s queenly activities would not have raised any hackles in England. But Marguerite was still failing in her more pressing royal duty—and for this, she would once again find herself struggling to stay on the right side of her people. In contrast to the fertile Yorks, and despite her visits to Thomas Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, the royal Marguerite’s marriage was bedeviled by the lack of any sign of children.
A prayer roll of Marguerite’s, unusually dedicated to the Virgin Mary rather than to the Saviour, shows Marguerite kneeling hopefully at her feet, probably praying for a pregnancy. One writer expressed, on Marguerite’s arrival, the psalmist’s hope that “thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thy house,” and the perceived link between a fertile monarchy and a fertile land* only added to the weight of responsibility. When Marguerite failed to deliver, many an Englishman’s suspicion of the foreign-born queen turned to open scorn—or worse. As early as 1448, a farm laborer was up before the lords declaring that “our Queen was none able to be Queen of England . . . for because that she beareth no child, and because that we have no prince in this land.”
The problem was probably with Henry, whose sexual drive was not high. The young man, who had famously left the room when one of his courtiers brought bare-bosomed dancing girls to entertain him, may also have been swayed by his spiritual counselor, who preached the virtues of celibacy. But it was usually the woman who was blamed for infertility, as Marguerite must have known. On the other hand, a child would have aligned the queen more clearly with English interests and perhaps removed from her the pressure of making herself felt in other, less acceptable, ways. Letters written by the king were now going out accompanied by a matching letter from the queen, and it was clear who was the more forceful personality.
Despite the petitions of his wife, Henry VI had never managed to enforce his promise to return Anjou and Maine to France, and in 1448 a French army had been dispatched to take what they had been promised. The following year, a temporary truce was broken by a misguided piece of militarism on the part of Somerset, now (like his brother before him) England’s military commander in France and (like his brother before him) making a woeful showing in the role. The French retaliation led them to Normandy. Rouen—where York and Cecily had ruled—swiftly fell, and soon Henry V’s great conquests were but a distant memory. Only Calais remained English property into the next century (and when that too was lost in the reign of Mary Tudor, the queen declared that when she died, they would find the word Calais engraved on her heart). York would have been more than human had he not cited this as one more example of his rivals’ inadequacies, while Suffolk (now elevated to a dukedom) did not hesitate to suggest that York aspired to the throne itself. Suffolk had the ear of both king and queen, and in 1449 York was sent to occupy a new post as governor of Ireland—or, as Jean de Waurin had it, “was expelled from court and exiled to Ireland.” Cecily went with him, giving birth to a son, George, in Dublin.
The place was even then known as being a graveyard of reputations for any Englishman sent to control it; still, given the timing, the Yorks may have been better off there, in comfortable exile. English politics were becoming ever more factionalized, and some of the quarrels could be seen swirling around the head of the young Margaret Beaufort, at the time only six years old.
After her father had died, wardship of the valuable young heiress, with the right to reap the income of her lands, had been given to Suffolk, although (unusually for the English nobility) baby Margaret was at least left in her mother’s care. Her marriage, however, was never going to be left to her mother to arrange. By 1450 she was a pawn of which her guardian, Suffolk, had urgent necessity.
Most of the blame for recent disasters in England’s long war with France had been heaped on Suffolk’s head, though there was enmity left over and to spare for Marguerite, whose father had actually been one of the commanders in the French attack. Suffolk was arrested at the end of January 1450, and at some time over the next week, to protect the position of his own family, he arranged the marriage of the six-year-old heiress, Margaret, to his eight-year-old son, John de la Pole. Presumably in this, as in everything else, Suffolk had Queen Marguerite’s support.
The marriage of two minors, too young to give consent, and obviously unconsummated, could not be wholly binding: Margaret herself would always disregard it, speaking of her next husband as her first. Nonetheless, it was significant enough to play its part; when, a few weeks later, the Commons brought charges against Suffolk, prominent among the other charges—of corruption and incompetence and of selling out England to the French—was that he had arranged the marriage “presuming and pretending her [Margaret] to be next inheritable to the Crown.”
Suffolk was placed in the Tower, but appealed directly to the king. Henry, to the fury of both the Commons and the Lords, refused to proceed to extremes against Suffolk. Absolving him of all capital charges, he sentenced him only to a comparatively lenient five years’ banishment. Shakespeare has Marguerite pleading against even this, with enough passion to cause her husband concern and to have the Earl of Warwick declare it a slander to her royal dignity. But in fact, the king had already gone as far as he felt able in resisting the pressure from peers and Parliament alike, who would rather have seen Suffolk executed. And indeed, when at the end of April Suffolk finally set sail, having been granted a six-week respite to set his affairs in order, his departure did become a final one. He was murdered on his way into exile, his body cast onshore at Dover on May 2.
It had been proved all too clearly that Henry VI, unlike his immediate forebears, was a king unable to control his own subjects (just as Marguerite, despite her forcefulness, had none of the power that, a century before, had enabled Isabella of France to rule with and protect for so long her favorite and lover, Mortimer). It has been said that when the news reached the queen—broken to her by Suffolk’s widow, Alice Chaucer—she shut herself into her rooms at Westminster to weep for three days. In fact, king and queen were then at Leicester, which casts some doubt on the whole story—but tales of Marguerite’s excessive, compromising grief would have been received with angry credence in the country.
It was said at the time that, because Suffolk had apparently been murdered by sailors out of Kent, the king and queen planned to raze that whole county
. Within weeks of Suffolk’s death came a populist rising lead by Jack Cade, or “John Amend-All,” as he called himself, a colorful Yorkist sympathizer backed by three thousand (mostly) Kentish men. The rebels demanded an inquiry into Duke Humfrey’s death and insisted that the Crown lands and common freedoms given away on Suffolk’s advice should all be restored. (They also made particular complaint against the Duchess of Suffolk; indeed, her perceived influence may have been the reason that, the next year, Parliament demanded the dismissal of Alice Chaucer from court.)
By the middle of June, the rebels were camped on Blackheath, just to the south of London. In the first days of July, they entered the city, joined initially by many of the citizens. Several days of looting and riot changed that. The rebellion collapsed, and Cade himself fled to Sussex, where he was killed. But it had exposed even more cruelly than before the weakness of the government. The royal pardons offered to the rebels were declared, as was customary (if in this case unlikely), to have been won from Henry by “the most humble and persistent supplications, prayers and requests of our most serene and beloved wife and consort the queen.”
Even as the authorities were horrified by the Cade rebellion, they also had a stream of bad news from France with which to contend. In May the Duke of Somerset had been forced to follow the surrender of Rouen by the surrender of Caen. Even as Cade died, other English citadels were falling. When Cherbourg too fell on August 12, 1450, England had now, as one Paston correspondent put it, “not a foot of ground left in Normandy.” But Somerset’s favor with the queen survived his military disasters. It was Marguerite who protected Somerset, on his return to London, from demands that he should be charged as a traitor, but this flamboyant partisanship was itself a potential source of scandalous rumor (despite the fact that Somerset’s wife, Eleanor Beauchamp, was herself [like Suffolk’s widow, Alice Chaucer] also close to the queen, which might seem to make illicit relations the less likely).
In the vacuum left by Suffolk’s death, meanwhile, two leading candidates arose to vie for the position of the king’s chief councilor. One was indeed the Duke of Somerset, Margaret Beaufort’s uncle. The other candidate was Cecily’s husband, Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, now making a hasty, unannounced return from Ireland and intensely aware of his position both as the king’s ranking male kinsman and as the progenitor of a flourishing nursery, “the issue that it pleased God to send me of the royal blood,” as he put it, pointedly.
York’s dissatisfaction with the current regime was no doubt partly personal—he had been left seriously out of pocket by his experiences abroad—but at the start of the 1450s, he could be seen at the same time as heading a call for genuine reform. Six years into Marguerite’s queenship, the Crown of England was in a lamentable state, so poor the Epiphany feast of 1451 had reputedly to be called off because suppliers would no longer allow the court food on credit, while the king’s officials had recently been petitioning Parliament for several years’ back wages. This was certainly no new problem—the financial position had been markedly serious a decade before Marguerite arrived in England—but it was now worse than ever. By 1450, the Crown was almost four hundred thousand pounds in debt.
The military campaign in France had been disastrously expensive, and the war inevitably caused disruption to trade—but the costs of maintaining the royal court were also now conspicuously far greater than the revenues available, especially under the influence of a high-spending queen, while there was widespread suspicion that her favorites were being allowed to feather their nests too freely. On Marguerite’s arrival in England, Parliament had voted her the income usually bestowed on queens—ten thousand marks, or some sixty-seven hundred pounds—but the parlous state of her husband’s finances meant that, in particular, those sums due her from the Exchequer were often not forthcoming. The surviving accounts show her making determined efforts to claim her dues, but they also show a formidable expenditure of money—not just the seventy-three pounds she might give to a Venetian merchant for luxury cloths, or the twenty-five pounds to equip a Christmas “disguising,” or masque, but sums of money clearly used to reward, in gifts and in high wages, her allies.
With the king and those around him thus looking vulnerable, York moved to act. The Parliament of May 1451 saw a petition for York to be named as heir presumptive to the childless Henry VI and his and Cecily’s sons after him. Everything we know about her would suggest Cecily stood right alongside her husband, whose allies were by the beginning of 1452 claiming that the king “was fitter for a cloister than a throne, and had in a manner deposed himself by leaving the affairs of his kingdom in the hands of a woman who merely used his name to conceal her usurpation.”
Although it is unclear whether the enmity between Marguerite and York was as instinctive and began as early as has popularly been supposed, there is no doubt that by this point, real conflict was on the way. By February 1452, both sides were raising troops. On March 2, the two armies drew up, three miles apart, near Blackheath, from which Jack Cade’s rebels had launched their attack less than two years before.
Neither party, however, was yet quite ready to fight. A royal delegation of two bishops and two earls was sent to command York, in the king’s name, to return to his allegiance. Prominent among York’s demands was that Somerset should be arrested and York himself acknowledged the king’s heir. Back in the royal camp (so one story goes), the bishops saw to it that the queen was kept occupied while they spoke to the king, who was persuaded to agree to all of York’s demands. But the next morning, in a dramatic scene, Marguerite intercepted the guards who were leading Somerset away and instead led him to the king’s tent so that York, arriving a few minutes later to make his peace with his monarch, found himself also confronting a furious queen. Somerset was clearly in as much favor as ever, and York understandably felt he had been fooled. He had no option, however, but to make a humiliating public pledge of his loyalty before being allowed to withdraw to his estates in Ludlow.
Armed conflict had been averted for the moment, but the divisions in the English nobility were deeper even than they had been before. The resentful York and his adherents remained a threat for a king and a court party anxious to strengthen their position in any possible way. One of the ways most favored by the age was marriage, and so, in February 1453, Margaret Beaufort’s mother was commanded to bring her nine-year-old daughter—Somerset’s niece—to court.
Margaret Beaufort, during the first years of Marguerite’s queenship, had been raised at her own family seat of Bletsoe, as well as at Maxey in the Fens, the great marshy region of eastern England. Her mother had remarried, and though she was growing up without a biological father—a pattern that would be repeated with her own fatherless son—there is evidence from her later life both that Margaret developed an enduring closeness with her five half siblings from her mother’s first marriage with Sir Oliver St. John and that she learned to share several traits with her mother: piety and a love of learning, matched by an ambition for money and property. On April 23, 1453, she and her mother attended the Garter celebrations that marked St. George’s Day; on May 12, the king put through a generous payment of one hundred marks for the arraying of his “right dear and well beloved cousin Margaret.” But Margaret Beaufort had not been invited to court just for a party. The king had decided both to dissolve her espousal to Suffolk’s son and to give her wardship to two new guardians: his half brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor.
Margaret Beaufort’s new Tudor guardians were the sons of Henry VI’s mother, the French-born Katherine de Valois, by her second, secret, alliance with a young Welshman in her service, the lowly Owen Tudor—or “Tydder,” as the family’s enemies would spell it slightingly. More to the point, they were half brothers whom the still-childless Henry had begun to favor, having still no son of his own to succeed him and with the older relations who had once been his mentors now dead.
It seems certain that when the king had the marriage with Suffolk’s son dissolved, he already h
ad it in mind to marry Margaret and her fortune to Edmund Tudor, the elder of his two half brothers. This could take place in just over two years’ time, as soon as she turned twelve and reached the age of consent. It is possible he envisaged it as a step to making Edmund his heir, though of course Edmund’s own lineage gave him no shadow of right to the English throne. (Edmund Tudor had royal blood in his veins all right—but it was the blood of the French, not the English, royal house.) But marriage might allow him to absorb Margaret’s claim—a claim that, of course, would certainly be inherited by any sons of the marriage. And the fact that Henry had neither children nor royal siblings meant that even comparatively distant claims were coming into prominence. It was a situation comparable to that preceding the death of Margaret’s great-granddaughter Elizabeth I, in 1603.
The formal changes in her marital situation required some participation from the nine-year-old Margaret herself. She would later imagine it as a real choice and an expression of manifest destiny, claiming that she had prayed to Saint Nicholas to help her choose between the two putative husbands. Later in life, Margaret would describe to her chaplain John Fisher how, the night before she had to give her formal assent to her marriage, as she lay in prayer at about four in the morning, “one appeared unto her arrayed like a Bishop, and naming unto her Edmund, bade take him unto her husband. And so by this mean she did incline her mind unto Edmund, the King’s brother, and Earl of Richmond.”
Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses Page 5