As York gained support, Margaret, too, continued to further her aim. In January 1454, after another, last-ditch attempt was made to get Henry to recognize his son, according to the Paston Letters, the queen, “being a manly woman, using [being used to] rule and not being ruled,” and unaware of when, or if, the king might ever awaken from his stupor, made a pitch to become Edward’s regent. But because she was hampered by her gender as well as her French origins, her efforts didn’t go over too well. However, Margaret’s biographer Helen Maurer points out that Margaret could not have become regent anyway, because in the Middle Ages a wife was legally her husband’s property, viewed by the law as an extension of himself. She could act as her husband’s representative and agent, provided her actions expressed his will and had his authority, but on a legal technicality the king could not grant away any aspect of his decision-making capacity to Margaret as an independent person. Henry would only have been deeding such authority right back to himself, because a man and wife were viewed by the law as one and the same being. Additionally, during this era a regent was expected to lead the army and be the first man in the king’s council, which was a boys-only clubhouse.
Finally, when Parliament convened on February 14, the Lords confirmed Edward’s title as heir apparent, and York was compelled to assent to their decision. On March 15, the boy was made Prince of Wales, Earl of Chester, and a Knight of the Garter. Twelve days later, it was York whom the Lords named as Regent, awarding him the title Protector of the Realm.
On April 3, York commanded that Margaret and the prince be removed from Westminster to Windsor, ostensibly to be with the king, but it was a clear message that he wanted the queen far from the seat of government. A consort’s place was in the home. But there was something sinister at work. Margaret was essentially under house arrest! When she found out that she was not permitted to quit Windsor, she became more convinced than ever that the nobles intended to make York the king of England.
And then suddenly, after sixteen and a half months of catatonia . . . there was a Christmas miracle!
On December 25, 1454, “by the grace of God the King recovered his health,” described by one observer, “as a man who wakes after a long dream.” He had absolutely no memory of anything that had transpired during the entire period of his illness. As soon as his powers of speech were restored, Henry ordered a Mass of thanksgiving, sending emissaries with offerings to Canterbury, as well as to the shrine of Edward the Confessor in Westminster Abbey.
On December 28, according to the Paston Letters, “the Queen came to him and brought my lord Prince with her. And then he asked what the Prince’s name was, and the Queen told him Edward, and then he held up his hands and thanked God therefor. And he asked who were the godfathers, and the Queen told him, and he was well pleased.”
On January 9, 1455, Edmund Clere, an esquire of the king’s household, wrote to John Paston of the king’s remarkable recovery. Henry had spoken to two clerics on January 7 “. . . as well as he ever did, and when they came out, they wept for joy.”
Henry’s recovery did not, however, mean that his throne was secure. By the spring of 1455, Somerset was still spreading rumors that York intended to depose the king. Margaret and Somerset had convinced Henry of York’s plans as well.
Although Henry had declared that anyone who raised an army against him was a traitor, the respective royal houses finally came to blows on May 22, 1455, at St. Albans. The king nominally led his own army into battle, as the Duke of Buckingham was the actual commander of his forces. Henry sat astride his warhorse while arrows rained down around him. By the end of the day, Somerset was dead, Buckingham taken prisoner, and Henry had been pierced in the neck by an arrow. Inexplicably, he granted forgiveness to the Duke of York and his adherents.
The duke took possession of Henry’s wounded body, and although the king still wore his crown, it had become clear that thenceforth the Yorkists would control the government. By the autumn of 1455, York was king in all but name. It is possible that the king suffered another neurological episode around this time, because Margaret’s request to care for him was granted and York sent Henry to Margaret at Greenwich. The queen’s intention was to get her husband into her protection so that she could influence him as well as look after his welfare. The Paston Letters report on October 28, 1455, that “summe men ar a-aferd that he is seek ageyn.”
Nevertheless, Henry rallied enough to appear in Parliament and reassert his authority, revoking York’s appointment in February 1456. However, by this time, Londoners in particular were fed up with Lancastrian mismanagement. Yet rather than blame the misrule on the king, his wife became the target of their ire.
But if Londoners didn’t like the queen, the feeling was mutual. Margaret quit the capital and began to drum up support for her husband from the safety of Kenilworth. Unfortunately, this separation from the king meant that Henry was left under York’s influence back in London.
To alleviate the threat, that summer Margaret convinced Henry to remove his court to the Lancastrian bastion of Coventry in the Midlands. Henry gave her chancellor, Laurence Booth, the privy seal, and with that imprimatur in her possession she had total power over the administrative nuts and bolts of her husband’s government.
The queen then embarked on an effort of good public relations, appearing in public with her son, promoting English trade and industry, founding schools and hospitals, and shoring up the people’s goodwill. Yet while Margaret focused on consolidating her power, there were riots in London. The queen began to stockpile arms as she continued to endure the rampant gossip that would plague her for the next several years: that the Prince of Wales was a love child. More than one court favorite was cited as the boy’s father.
In December 1457, taking a more active role than her husband in their efforts to secure his throne, Margaret introduced military conscription to ensure that the Lancastrians would have enough soldiers to defend the crown. Although conscription had been used in France, the English had never before availed themselves of the system, and the queen’s new measures were extremely unpopular. As Margaret drummed up support in the event of another inevitable skirmish with the Yorkists, Henry, ever determined to broker peace, was quoting biblical passages, citing Saint Matthew: “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation.”
While Yorkist propaganda successfully claimed that the king had been led astray by evil counselors, including his wife, that he had placed himself above the law, and banished “all righteousness and justice” from the kingdom, Margaret harbored the overwhelming fear that the Prince of Wales would never succeed her husband. In one of the Paston Letters dated February 9, 1456, John Bocking wrote to John Fastolf, “The Quene is a grete and strong labourid woman, for she spareth noo peyne to sue hire thinges to an intent and conclusion to hir power.” In other words, by the early part of 1459, Margaret had become commander in chief of the royal forces.
Unfortunately for her, the Yorkists achieved another resounding victory in July 1460 at the Battle of Northampton. Henry was captured by a Yorkist archer who brought the king to his tent, where the Earl of Warwick and York’s son the Earl of March (the future Edward IV) swore fealty to Henry, but refused to free him.
Margaret, who had been at Eccleshall Castle during the battle, was devastated by the news of her husband’s capture. She took flight with their son, heading through Cheshire toward Wales, but was robbed of her jewels and the other luxury goods she carried by one of her own servants, John Cleger. Cleger even threatened to kill the queen and her son—at which point, rather than defend their mistress, several of Margaret’s entourage deserted her. Margaret and Edward managed to escape while the covetous Cleger rifled through her baggage.
Temporarily frightened, but ultimately undeterred, the queen then made a clever political feint, spreading the word that she’d gone to France to enlist troops there. In fact, she traveled in the other direction, going only as fa
r as Denbigh, a market town in Wales. She began what would be a quest for any and every kind of aid (troops, money, alliances) that would take her from England to Scotland to France, while Henry remained under York’s watchful eye.
On October 7, 1460, Henry attended the opening day of Parliament, but after that, he stayed in the queen’s apartments in Westminster Palace. York entered London with great pageantry and arrogantly asserted his claim to the throne, expecting a warm reception. Instead, he was greeted with an embarrassed silence from the Lords. Weak though he was, and despite his rampant misgovernment, Henry had been king for thirty-eight years, and the Lords saw no reason for him to be deposed.
After considerable negotiation between Henry and York, an Act of Accord was announced on October 31. The decision made by Parliament formalized the new order of succession. Henry VI would remain on the throne for the duration of his lifetime, but Edward of Lancaster, Prince of Wales, was effectively disinherited in favor of the Duke of York, who was now proclaimed Henry’s heir apparent.
Henry dispatched a messenger to Margaret, asking her to bring their son to London. If she failed to do so, she would be declared a rebel.
From this point on, the power struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York was no longer about governmental reform. It was for the crown itself. And, as demonstrated by the outcomes of the various Wars of the Roses, might would make right.
With York proclaimed heir to the throne and Protector of England for the second time, he now ruled the realm in Henry’s name. Margaret was at Hull when she learned of their son’s dispossession. Naturally she became even more determined to recruit men who would stand up for the Lancastrian cause, mustering twenty thousand by the time she reached the city of York. She made a formal public protest against the Act of Accord and announced her intention to lead her forces into London and free her husband from his enemies.
Before she could do so, on December 30, York was killed at the Battle of Wakefield—a skirmish between his troops and Margaret’s forces. The duke’s corpse was beheaded, and further humiliated when a paper crown was placed upon his decapitated head. York’s seventeen-year-old son, the Earl of Rutland, was killed and beheaded as well.
After Wakefield the fight for the English throne became even more violent. The most popular Yorkist talking point was that the Lancastrians were usurpers, their dynasty founded upon a regicide—the murder of Richard II. The Lancastrians contended that they had held the throne for the past three generations, and with even more right to it.
Following many months of separation, the royal family was tearfully reunited after the second battle of St. Albans in February 1461. But Margaret’s hesitation to march her troops into London (where carts of victuals intended for her soldiers had been intercepted by pro-York citizens) was a fatal mistake for the Lancastrians. On February 27, the eighteen-year-old Earl of March, Edward of York, eldest son of the decapitated duke, rode into the capital with twenty thousand knights and thirty thousand foot soldiers behind him, taking possession of the city. As Londoners cried, “Avenge us on King Henry and his wife!” the earl was proclaimed King Edward IV. He vowed not to be crowned until Henry and Margaret had been executed or exiled, declaring that Henry had forfeited his right to the throne by violating the Act of Accord and permitting his wife to take up arms against the crown’s rightful heirs.
For the next several years, Margaret and Henry were more or less in self-imposed exile as they eluded capture by Edward’s forces. Henry first sought sanctuary in the Convent of Greyfriars at Kirkcudbright, while the queen and Prince of Wales traveled to the Scottish court. They were still in Scotland when, with great fanfare, Edward IV was crowned king of England in Westminster Abbey on June 28, 1461.
On November 4, acts of attainder were passed in Parliament dispossessing 150 loyal Lancastrians of their estates, including Henry VI. He, and not Edward IV, was referred to as “the usurper,” Margaret was “late called Queen of England,” and Edward of Lancaster was described as Margaret’s son, but not Henry’s. Edward IV even had the duchy of Lancaster declared forfeit to the crown, and henceforth, all English subjects were forbidden, upon pain of death, to communicate with Henry and Margaret.
After her fund-raising sojourn in Scotland, Margaret went to France with the Prince of Wales, seeking an alliance with their king. Her uncle Charles VII had died and his son was on the throne as Louis XI. On June 28, 1462, Margaret signed a hundred-year truce with France on Henry’s behalf. It stated that all English subjects were prohibited from setting foot on French soil unless they were loyal to her husband; nor were they to enter into any compacts with Henry’s known enemies or any other of his rebellious subjects (in other words, Edward IV).
The price of this treaty: Calais.
Margaret possessed nearly superhuman indomitability and courage, and she never lost her resolve to recapture Henry’s throne. She reconnoitered with her husband at Berwick, just south of England’s border with Scotland, and, leaving their son there, the deposed sovereigns sallied forth to invade England. With only eight hundred men in addition to their respective entourages, they were woefully outnumbered by Edward IV’s army. Then a storm and a disastrous shipwreck destroyed their plans.
Margaret’s travails continued into 1463. Alternately on the offense and on the defense, she was robbed of her jewelry, nearly murdered, and she and the Prince of Wales were kidnapped. The queen managed to break free and get to Edinburgh, but was so impoverished that she had to borrow a groat from an archer to make an offering on Saint Margaret’s feast day. That summer, leaving Henry behind at Bamburgh Castle in Northumbria, Margaret resumed her Continental peregrinations in search of alliances and funds, but she was not met with open arms.
After the Lancastrians suffered another humiliating military defeat at the Battle of Hexham on May 15, 1464, Henry remained a fugitive for more than a year, transferring from one safe house to another. But in July of 1465, his luck ran out when he was recognized at Waddington Hall by a Yorkist sympathizer. A skirmish broke out and Henry fled into nearby Clitherow Forest, where he was taken captive.
Henry was transported south to London in the most ignominious conditions—bound to a small horse without spurs, his legs tied to the stirrups with leather thongs. A rope tethered him to the saddle, and the straw hat of a penitent had been placed upon his head. Paraded through the streets of London, he was pelted with rocks and refuse. Insults rained down on him as well, some of them deriding his wife. One heckler even accused the former queen of being “shameless with her body.”
Henry was then incarcerated in the Tower of London. Accounts diverge regarding the welcome he received there, some averring that he was respectfully treated, others that he was left in poor hygienic conditions. “Anybody was allowed to come and speak to him,” insisted John Warkworth, a chronicler of the reign of Edward IV, and one visitor managed to attack the deposed king with a dagger, wounding him in the neck. Henry forgave his assailant, chastising him for doing “foully to smite a king anointed so.” Margaret was devastated by the news of Henry’s capture. She would have liked nothing better than to raise an army and rescue him, but he was being held alive in exchange for her good behavior.
Meanwhile, Edward of Lancaster was maturing quickly and would soon be able to avenge his father’s deposition. The ambassador from Milan observed that Margaret and Henry’s son, “though only thirteen years of age, talks of nothing else but cutting off heads or making war, as if he had everything in his hands or was the god of battle.”
Henry remained in the Tower for the next five years. In the interim, disaffected with Edward IV, Warwick the “kingmaker” turned his coat. At the urging of the French sovereign, the earl brokered an unholy alliance with Margaret to help Henry regain his crown. Warwick’s price was the marriage of his younger daughter, Anne Neville, to Margaret and Henry’s son, with the promise that the earl would be named Regent and Governor of England if Henry became king agai
n, but died before Edward of Lancaster attained his majority.
The fifteenth-century chronicler Philippe de Commynes registered his shock at this new alliance. Margaret had repeatedly condemned Warwick, and with good reason! In the past he had slandered her character and consistently worked not only to dethrone, but to imprison Henry. Now she was prepared to wed their only son to “the daughter of him that did it!”
On July 25, 1470, Edward of Lancaster was betrothed to Anne Neville in Angers Cathedral. Politics make strange bedfellows, but this union was not a recipe for success. Sixteen-year-old Edward had a penchant for violence, bearing a perpetual grudge against the world and a thirst for revenge. Each teen had been raised to despise the other’s parents, and Margaret had agreed to the match only as a means of restoring her husband to the throne. A papal dispensation was required before the kids could wed, because they were related—cousins in the fourth degree, both being great-grandchildren of John of Gaunt.
On September 13, 1470, Warwick and his supporters arrived on English soil and proclaimed Henry VI “the very true and undoubted King of England,” calling upon the people to take up arms against the usurper Edward IV. The earl issued a proclamation stating that his invasion had been authorized “by the assent of the most noble princess, Margaret, Queen of England, and the right high and mighty Prince Edward.”
With popular opinion—and an army—against him, Edward IV fled for the Continent and Henry VI was released from the Tower of London, emerging from his long incarceration, according to the chronicler John Warkworth, “as a man amazed, utterly dulled with troubles and adversities.” Nor was he “. . . worshipfully arrayed as a prince, and not so cleanly kept as should seem such a prince.”
Inglorious Royal Marriages Page 5