Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  Underneath the chivalric pageant lurked something darker, as became clear during a second tournament held in the leading city of Bruges, after Margaret’s arrival in Burgundy. Louis of France—who had no wish his two enemies, England and Burgundy, should ally—had been spreading rumors about Princess Margaret’s chastity. The rumors seem actually to have originated with the Milanese ambassador at the French court, who had passed on stories that Margaret was “somewhat attached to love affairs and even, in the opinion of many, has had a son”; there is no reason to believe there was any truth in the tale, but Edward’s own love affairs and colorful marriage must have lent some air of plausibility to it. Despite the rumors about the bride, the tournament when Margaret arrived in Bruges was no less splendid than the one at Smithfield had been, and possibly more genuinely perilous. (Burgundy paid full lip service to the courtly ideal, and Charles genuinely loved warfare; in the end, Margaret had to wave her handkerchief to ask him to call off the bloodshed.) She was, so John Paston reported, “received as worshipfully as all the world could devise.”

  Elizabeth Woodville’s brothers were prominent both among the escort who accompanied Margaret across the Channel and among the participants in the tournament. In Bruges, Edward Woodville was declared prince of the tourney. Anthony Woodville was Margaret’s chief presenter at the Burgundian court. Perhaps he reminded her of the proper etiquette when, meeting her new mother-in-law for the first time, the two ladies knelt to each other for the appropriate duration; perhaps he reassured her after her new husband, the first time he clapped eyes on her, stared into her face for “a tract of time,” “avising” her, or checking out her possibilities.

  It was lucky the English government had granted expenses to send Margaret off generously equipped with £1,000 of silks and £160 of gold, silver, and gilt dishes, for the nine-day celebrations were lavish enough to have eclipsed the new bride. The Tournament of the Golden Tree in Bruges was built around a specially created fantasia with all the tropes of quests and mysterious ladies so beloved of chivalry and formed only part of the nine-day celebrations. The guests at each day’s feast delighted in gilded swans and stags carrying baskets of oranges, or unicorns bearing baskets of sweets; monkeys threw trinkets to the company, and a court dwarf on a gilded lion competed for attention with a wild man on a dromedary. John Paston wrote, “As for the Duke’s court as of ladies and gentlewomen, knights, squires and gentlemen I heard never of none like to it save King Arthur’s court . . . for such gear and gold and pearl and stones they of the Duke’s court, neither gentlemen or gentlewomen they want none.” A crown still survives in Aachen inscribed MARGARIT[A] DE [Y]O[R]K, of silvergilt, enamel, precious stones, and pearls, ornamented with white roses, most likely made either to celebrate Margaret’s wedding or as a votive offering, to be worn by the statue of the Virgin that still carries it on major feast days.

  There is no reason to doubt that, on the other side of the royal family, Cecily too approved her daughter’s marriage. Charles was, in Edward’s words, “one of the mightiest Princes in the world that beareth no crown,” and queens (the position to which Cecily aspired) expected to send their daughters away. But whatever Cecily Neville’s thoughts on the matter, it is impossible to separate the acknowledgment of the Yorkist dynasty that Margaret’s marriage represented from the success of the Woodville family.

  The prominence of the unpopular Woodvilles was helping to ensure that the Lancastrian threat never went away. As long as the Yorkist regime was open to such piercing criticism, a viable alternative would hold some degree of appeal for the people of England. These were paranoid years for Edward and his family. From abroad, messengers were still being captured, bringing instructions from Marguerite to her partisans in England, and one of these letters even seemed to have revealed a plot close to the heart of the new regime. One Cornelius, a shoemaker serving one of Marguerite of Anjou’s gentlemen, had been captured carrying incriminating letters from Lancastrian exiles and tortured, so the “Worcester” chronicler puts it, “by burning in the feet until he confessed many things.” He named a man called John Hawkins as a Lancastrian supporter. Hawkins, in turn, accused a London merchant called Sir Thomas Cook. As for the cause for Cook’s opposition to the Yorkist dynasty, the Great Chronicle of London suggests that he had been the object of a vendetta by Jacquetta, Elizabeth Woodville’s mother, to whom he had refused to sell, at an unreasonably low price, a fine tapestry. Clearly, the Woodvilles were stirring up trouble in more ways than one.

  Jasper Tudor, for his part, had never flagged in his support for the cause of Henry VI, and in the summer of 1468—just weeks after Princess Margaret had set sail for Burgundy—he landed in Wales with three ships provided by King Louis of France. It was too small a force for a serious invasion, but it represented, as it was intended to, an embarrassment for King Edward. As one of Edward’s chief supporters in Wales, William Herbert—also Henry Tudor’s guardian—was ordered to raise troops and ride against Jasper Tudor. Herbert took the twelve-year-old Henry with him, for his first taste of action. Jasper Tudor and Henry Tudor, uncle and nephew, were on opposite sides of the battlefield, but luckily neither saw dreadful consequences that day. But the thought of her son’s danger, when she heard of it, must have been terrifying for Henry’s mother, Margaret Beaufort.

  Indeed, Margaret Beaufort’s position had already been undermined by the actions of other members of the Beaufort family. King Edward had from the start of his reign shown her and her husband a certain amount of conciliatory favor, granting them the great moated manor house of Woking where they made a luxurious home. In the first days of Edward’s reign, it had looked as if the Beaufort fortunes were slowly rising again. In 1463 Margaret’s cousin Henry, the third Duke of Somerset, had accepted a pardon and received many favors from the new king. But only the next year, Somerset had betrayed Edward and been summarily executed. His younger brother and heir, the fourth duke, became a leader of the Lancastrian exiles. After that, the king could hardly be blamed if he looked on all Beauforts warily.

  _______________

  *He adds how she came to see the duke disguised “in the garb of a chambermaid”: it would prove to be repeated as a contemporary trope.

  *Of course, as so often is the case, a look at the personalities offers a slightly different perspective: this Duchess of Norfolk, Katherine Neville, Cecily Neville’s elder sister, had been married off by her father in 1412, in the chapel of Raby Castle to the Duke of Norfolk. She swindled his estates after he died, then married a servant in the household, and then married a third time to a Viscount Beaumont. She would outlive all her husbands, the last included. It is just possible she was not entirely the passive victim here.

  *Chivalric spectacle, with the ritual parade of homage paid by knights to ladies, also gave to women the semblance of authority. There is considerable debate over whether it, and the whole ideal of courtly love, improved their actual lot in any way.

  9

  “DOMESTIC BROILS”

  . . . and domestic broils

  Clean over-blown, themselves the conquerors

  Make war upon themselves, brother to brother

  THE TRAGEDY OF RICHARD

  THE THIRD, 2.4

  It would swiftly become apparent that the threat from surviving Lancastrians was not the only one that Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville faced. The Yorkist dynasty would soon be in greater danger from divisions within than it would be from the impoverished queen in France or her supporters plotting in England.

  The great Warwick had been growing steadily more dissatisfied with his position under Edward’s rule and with Woodville’s prominence in the new regime. As the ally of Edward’s father, York, and as the guiding spirit of Edward’s own military takeover, he had naturally expected to play not only a leading but a preeminent part in the management of the country. But as Edward settled ever more firmly into the seat of power, Warwick found himself increasingly alienated. Warwick began to move against Edward—and as he did
, he found an extraordinary ally within the king’s immediate family.

  George, Duke of Clarence, was likewise disaffected, resentful of his position as a mere adjunct to his brother’s regime. For a while, he had hoped to find an alternative sphere of influence. There was talk of a second Burgundian marriage, with the Duke of Clarence marrying Charles of Burgundy’s daughter and heiress presumptive Mary. But that came to nothing, perhaps because Edward would have been dubious about giving the jealous Clarence a foreign crown and access to a foreign army.

  Instead of following in his sister Margaret’s footsteps, Clarence pursued a match much closer to home—and one that would prove just as disastrous for Edward as any Burgundian alliance. On July 12, 1469, the nineteen-year-old Clarence married Warwick’s eldest daughter, Isabel, Clarence’s second cousin and a woman just a year younger than he. History suggests she got a bad bargain, but to contemporaries like John Rous, Clarence was “seemly of person and well-visaged,” as well as “right witty.” This was another advantageous marriage for Clarence of which his brother the king disapproved: the Worcester chronicle suggests that two years earlier he had forbidden it, had indeed blocked attempts to secure the papal dispensation necessary for two relatives to marry. The erratic Clarence would, after all, be a potential weapon in Warwick’s hands. Yet, so long as the king had no son, Clarence was still his likeliest heir, and the king had a strong vested interest in arranging his marriage for the benefit of the country.

  Clarence’s position in the line of succession was obviously of prime importance to Warwick, who now began the machinations that would one day earn him his nickname, the Kingmaker. It was around the time of Clarence’s marriage into Warwick’s family that, on the Continent and among Warwick’s allies, rumors of Edward’s bastardy—rumors that implied Clarence was the true heir of the Yorkist monarchy—can first be traced with certainty. It has been suggested that Clarence’s mother, Cecily, had recently told him this was true: that his older brother Edward had been conceived in adultery. In 1469, the year of Clarence’s marriage, Edward asked his mother to exchange the castle of Fotheringhay, into which she had poured both money and effort, for the run-down Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire. It could have been punishment for spreading damaging rumors, or simply for a too visible partiality on Cecily’s part.*

  In view of Edward’s disapproval, the marriage ceremony and the celebration took place in Warwick’s own jurisdiction of Calais, away from the king’s eye, and Cecily traveled to Sandwich, from whence the wedding party was leaving. She may have done so to give them her blessing. Not only was Clarence her son, but Isabel was her goddaughter, an important connection in the fifteenth century. But she may, alternately, have been hoping to dissuade Clarence from a plan that could only divide her family.

  Whatever Cecily’s role in the matter, Edward had been right to worry about his brother’s closeness to their cousin. Warwick and Clarence now issued a proclamation inveighing against certain “seditious persons” prominent at Edward’s court: notably, Elizabeth Woodville’s father, brothers, and mother, Jacquetta—interestingly, the only woman named. (To have named the queen herself would have been a little too close to the bone.) The very day of the marriage, they declared their support for a rebellion in northern England—a rebellion Warwick had secretly been fostering. The next day, Warwick and Clarence sailed to England, almost certainly leaving their womenfolk to follow them later. Arriving in Kent, they set about raising an army.

  On July 26, at the battle of Edgecote Moor, Edward’s main army was defeated. The king himself was with a separate, smaller, force farther north, but on July 29 he was captured and taken to imprisonment in Yorkshire. Immediately thereafter, in August 1469, Margaret Beaufort—ever the opportunist—visited the London residence of the newly prominent Clarence, hoping to negotiate over those lands of Henry Tudor’s that Clarence held, and surely to regain custody of her son.

  The terrible news of Warwick’s betrayal and Edward’s capture hit Queen Elizabeth while she was making a formal visit to Norwich, only four months after the birth of her third daughter, named Cecily for the child’s paternal grandmother. Then came even worse news—that Warwick had captured her father, and her brother John, after the battle of Edgecote and executed them without trial.

  As Elizabeth retreated to London, in terror for her husband, she also had to face the accusations of witchcraft brought against her mother (possibly as a precursor to declaring invalid the marriage Jacquetta had helped to make, through such dubious means). The official documents, the Patent Rolls, show a Northamptonshire gentleman called Thomas Wake producing “an image of lead made like a man of arms the length of a man’s finger broken in the middle and made fast with a wire,” along with two other images, of a man and a woman, which he tried to prove Jacquetta had commissioned, presumably as a means of binding the king and her daughter together. Witchcraft was a serious allegation—one of the few from which even royal rank would not protect a woman.*

  Jacquetta, however, had allies behind her, and not only her relations. Her intercession with Marguerite on behalf of London almost a decade before had won her friends in the City, and now she appealed to the City authorities for support. The Wheel of Fortune was about to spin again.

  There was not enough support for Warwick’s coup. Edward was allowed to escape on September 10 and reached London in October, making a triumphal entry into the City. He commanded that the charges against his mother-in-law be examined, but it was January 1470 before Jacquetta was cleared of this “said slander.” If Thomas Wake were, as seems likely, a pawn of Clarence and Warwick, Jacquetta had been another woman to suffer for the friction between the York brothers.

  In December at Westminster, King Edward staged a deliberately public reconciliation with his brother Clarence and cousin Warwick, but in private the tension seems to have continued. As John Paston reported, though the lords claimed now to be the king’s best friends, “his household men have other language, so what shall hastily fall I cannot say.” Cecily and her daughters were surely working for a real rapprochement, and efforts were made, too, to reconcile the cousinship: Edward’s young daughter Elizabeth of York was betrothed to Warwick’s nephew, thus possibly suggesting that if Edward didn’t have a son, the crown might pass to his daughter rather than to Clarence in the collateral male line. If this were the suggestion, however, then it surely pushed Clarence even further, the more so since there was also now discussion of restoring young Henry Tudor to his father’s earldom of Richmond, greatly to the detriment of Clarence, who had been holding the lands.

  The peacemaking attempts were of course in vain. Clarence and Warwick quickly returned north, and perhaps the only real gainer was Marguerite, since Louis of France had responded to the Yorkist confusion by inviting the Lancastrian queen to his court, where as the year turned she enjoyed not only a reunion with her father, but also the promise of French support. Back in England, in the early months of 1470, more rebellions broke out. In March Cecily invited Edward and Clarence both to Baynard’s Castle, her London home, trying to bring about an agreement between her two sons, but to no avail. Warwick and Clarence instituted fresh uprisings. When Edward rode out to deal with them, Margaret Beaufort’s husband, the peaceable Henry Stafford, was summoned to arm himself and ride out with him. After Margaret’s misguided attempt to negotiate with Clarence the autumn before, there was need for a proof of loyalty.

  In April 1470, Warwick (and the wife and daughters who had now joined him and Clarence) was forced to flee back across the Channel, confident of finding safe haven in Calais. The confidence was misplaced: Warwick’s lieutenant had received orders from England, and Calais was now closed against them, dreadful news for everybody but disastrous for Clarence’s wife, the heavily pregnant Isabel, who, on the tiny heaving ship, with probably only her mother and sister for attendants, went into labor, with only two flagons of wine sent by the Calais commander for her relief.

  Isabel did not die, but her baby was stillborn. It wa
s the beginning of May before the party was allowed to make landfall in Normandy and then perhaps only because Louis had decided the diplomatic treaties that prevented him from openly helping Warwick permitted him to give refuge to the ladies. Spare a thought for Isabel’s younger sister, Anne Neville, here; besides the general wreck that had befallen her family, she must have known that her own hopes of making a good marriage had declined dramatically—until, that is, she heard what fortune (or her father) had in store.

  Edward in England now had two enemies in exile: Warwick and Marguerite of Anjou. As far back as 1467, it was claimed, some abroad believed the earl “favoured Queen Margaret’s party”; assuming that this was untrue, it may now have been the serpentine brain of Louis—the “Spider King” whose machinations Machiavelli observed before writing The Prince—that conceived the idea of making alliance between these two, themselves long the bitterest of enemies. And the age knew only one good way of cementing that sort of improbable alliance: marriage.