Queens Consort

by Lisa Hilton

  Marguerite’s father gave her the use of a castle and a small pension, but in 1480, he died. Bourdigne’s Chronicle mourned: ‘No prince ever loved his subjects as he loved his, nor was in like manner better loved and well-wished than he was by them,’ but Réne’s ‘love’ does not seem to have extended to his widowed, bereaved and dispossessed daughter. He had ceded his own inheritance to his nephew Charles of Maine, who had sold it on to King Louis, so now that he was gone, there was no one to pay Marguerite’s pension. She was forced to beg, writing plaintively to one of Louis’s ministers that ‘it may please him to take my poor case in the matter of what can and should belong to me, into his hands to do with it according to his good will and pleasure and still keep me in his good grace and love’.16 Louis obliged her by insisting she confirmed the 1476 donation and then permitting her to go to law with her living sibling, Yolande, for the resignation of her rights to the Barrois. By this time, Marguerite was living in penury and, having manipulated her for his own territorial gain, Louis simply abandoned her. She was compelled to leave her castle of Reculée as she could no longer maintain her household, and it was only the charity of Francois Vignolles, Lord of Morains and one of her father’s former vassals, that protected her. He provided her with a home in his castle of Dampierre, about three miles from Saumur on the River Loire. The final indignity came when Charles of Maine died and Marguerite was pressured to sign a will in Louis’s favour. It included a request that he provide funds for her funeral and burial with her parents at St Maurice d’Angers. Marguerite had her wish and was interred with her father who, despite his careless treatment, she seems to have loved to the end.

  Marguerite died aged fifty-two in August 1482. The last decade of her life had been one long fall from grace. There were some who still considered her a champion of the Lancastrian cause, and she had received a party of exiled Lancastrian lords in 1479, but the year of her death saw Edward IV’s dynasty apparently firmly established on the throne. At her coronation she had been hailed as a bringer of peace and plenty; she died an isolated exile, an impoverished symbol of war. King Louis demanded her hunting dogs be given to him as, pathetically, they were the only thing of value that she owned. No record exists of her funeral. It is possible that no one troubled to write one.

  The decade after Edward IV’s ultimate recovery of his kingdom had been peaceful and productive, both for the country as a whole and for Elizabeth Woodville. She gave Edward three more daughters, Anne, Katherine and Bridget, and a second son, Richard, Duke of York. Two other children, Margaret and George, died as infants. Her public activities reflected both pious and scholarly interests whose pattern had been disturbed by the upheavals of the Lancastrian insurrection. In 1466, she had received a grant from the city of London for a tract of land adjacent to Tower Hill, on which to build a chapel or college, and though no more is heard of this project, by 1479 Elizabeth had founded a chapel to St Erasmus at Westminster Abbey. She made grants to Holy Trinity, Syon Abbey to the Carthusians at Sheen and went on pilgrimage to Canterbury with her husband and eldest daughter. The Pope saw fit to make particular mention of her devotion to the Virgin and St Elizabeth, and granted exceptional indulgences to worshippers who recited the Hail Mary three times a day at the encouragement of the Queen. Elizabeth adopted Marguerite of Anjou’s foundation of Queens’ College, Cambridge and, along with her brother Lord Rivers, was a benefactress of Henry VI’s college at Eton.

  Two accounts of Elizabeth’s participation in public rituals give a sense of her conduct and, again, of how the way her background influenced perceptions of that conduct. One is the description of her churching banquet after the birth of her first child as queen. It was held in ‘an unbelievably costly apartment’, where she sat on a golden chair. Jacquetta and Edward’s sister Margaret stood apart and knelt when she spoke to them. They were not permitted a seat until the first dish had been placed on the table, while the other sixty ladies at the women-only event remained on their knees in silence until the Queen had dined. Elizabeth’s silence and the formal protocol of the event have been attributed to her ‘haughtiness’ and ‘arrogance’ (characteristics that may well have been seen as appropriate had she been a royal princess), but this strange, soundless ballet was part of a sacred ritual, and in no way expressed her own preferences.

  A warmer image is provided by Elizabeth’s role as hostess to Lord Gruuthuyse in 1472. Gruuthuyse had been Edward’s host during his Flemish exile, a sojourn that provided the King with an opportunity to experience the magnificence of the Burgundian court lifestyle and which was to be highly influential on his own tastes and cultural ambitions. Edward was keen to reward Gruuthuyse, and invited him to England, where he created him Earl of Winchester at Windsor. After supper, Edward conducted his guest to Elizabeth’s rooms, where she was playing at bowls with her ladies, a sight Gruuthuyse found charming. Following the bowls there was dancing and next day Elizabeth had a banquet prepared in her apartments. She had created three ‘chambers of pleasance’ hung with silks and floral tapestries, which featured a tented bath and a fine down bed for Gruuthuyse, complete with a cloth-of-gold and ermine counterpane, gold canopy, white curtains and sheets and pillows ‘of the queen’s own ordinance’. Elizabeth’s gilt-and-ivory beauty would have been set off to full advantage by such a backdrop, and here she appears as the perfect picture of graciousness and condescension, regal and courteous, yet simple enough to concern herself with cushions. Nothing in either of these accounts suggests that she was anything less than fully capable of fulfilling her royal role in public.

  Privately, Elizabeth’s situation was less satisfactory, as she was learning that even great beauty is not enough to hold a philandering man. Her sexual relationship with the King certainly continued until 1480, since she gave birth to Bridget, her last child, in November that year. But Thomas More noted that Edward was ‘greatly given to fleshly wantonness’, and few women could resist the attentions of a handsome king. Dominic Mancini, an Italian cleric in the service of one of Louis XI’s ministers, added that Edward generously passed on his mistresses to his friends when he tired of them. The King had a bastard son, Arthur, by his lover Elizabeth Lucy, and two daughters, the tactlessly named Elizabeth and Grace (with whom Elizabeth Woodville obviously had some sort of relationship, as Grace attended her funeral). Anti-Woodville writers have made a vice even of Elizabeth’s dignified silence in the face of her husband’s many infidelities, citing it as evidence of her ‘cold’ and ‘designing’ character.17 A similar twisting occurs in the case of Edward’s best-known mistress Jane Shore, a source of misconceptions about Elizabeth’s relationship with the chamberlain, William, Lord Hastings, which would affect the interpretation of her role in the events surrounding her son’s thwarted succession. Many commentators have accepted that Elizabeth hated Hastings, with whom she had a long history of disputes dating back to the 1460s, though there is some evidence that they collaborated with one another in the 1470s. The reason for this ‘hatred’ was supposedly the pleasure Hastings shared with Edward in ‘wanton company’, a tendency which, according to Mancini, spilled over into a quarrel with Elizabeth’s son by her first marriage, Thomas Grey, Marquess of Dorset. Dorset planned to take over from his stepfather in Jane Shore’s affections, but Mistress Shore wasted no time in throwing herself on the protection of the chamberlain. Thomas More bulks out Mancini’s gossip with a political motivation for the ill will between Hastings and the Woodvilles with the suggestion that Edward preferred Hastings for the governorship of Calais over the Queen’s candidate, her brother Lord Rivers, in 1482. The enmity between Hastings and the Queen’s family has been seen as a crucial stalling point in Edward V’s accession, though Elizabeth’s personal responsibility for it is ‘the most uncertain factor of all’.18

  Malicious rumour also placed Elizabeth Woodville at the centre of another controversy of the 1470s: the execution of the Duke of Clarence. Isabel Neville died in January 1477, yet the King was reluctant to allow his untrustworthy
brother to marry again. Matches were proposed with Mary, the heiress to the Duke of Burgundy, and Margaret, the King of Scotland’s sister, but the former would have prejudiced Edward’s concord with Louis of France and the latter given Clarence a power base disturbingly proximate to England. A truculent Clarence began to display his contempt for Edward’s authority and in May 1477 expressly defied the King with his support of one Thomas Burdet, who was hanged for treason, sorcery and the spread of sedition that month. There were whispers of another rebellion plot, which the Duke compounded by claiming that he and his heirs had the true right to Henry VI’s crown and encouraging some of his men to swear fealty to him. Clarence was becoming dangerous, and by June Edward felt he had no choice but to arrest him. The Queen was reported to be using her influence to destroy the Duke, for fear that her son would never reign while his uncle was alive, but the decision to execute Clarence in February 1478 was Edward’s and Edward’s alone. Elizabeth may never have forgiven Clarence for conspiring with Warwick, so it is possible that she did perceive him as a threat and welcomed his demise, but her purported responsibility in the matter proves nothing more than the readiness of her critics to attribute her husband’s unpleasant political actions to the powers of persuasion of his wife, a trope with which English queens had had to contend since Eleanor of Provence’s day.

  Despite the shadows of Edward’s infidelity and the bitterness of Clarence’s death, it appeared that by 1482 the royal couple had finally overcome the horrors and sufferings of years of war. The Croyland Chronicle presents an idyllic picture of the family at Christmas that year: ‘You might have seen, in those days, the royal court presenting no other appearance than such as fully befits a most mighty kingdom, filled with riches, boasting of the sweet and beautiful children, the issue of [Edward’s] marriage with Queen Elizabeth.’ As ever for Elizabeth, though, peace and security proved to be short-lived.

  CHAPTER 18

  ANNE NEVILLE

  ‘I’ll have her, but I will not keep her long …’

  Despite being born to great wealth and married to even greater estate, Anne Neville appears until 1472 as a victim. Her marriage had annealed one of the most implausible alliances in English history, but its brokers had failed in their purpose and she found herself a widow having barely been a wife, a princess without a title and an heiress without an estate. But after eight months as the reluctant ward of the Duke of Clarence, Anne took an extraordinary step. She arranged her own marriage and moreover, if Hall’s account of the aftermath of Tewkesbury is credited, she chose for her second husband the man who had murdered her first.

  The motivation behind Anne’s strike for independence lay in her unusual legal position. As a widow, she enjoyed the status of a femme sole with the legal right to conduct her own affairs, but whatever hopes she may have had of regaining her inheritance were thwarted. Any prospective dower settlement she could have expected as Dowager Princess of Wales was now void, but she was entitled to a half share of her father’s Neville lands. The other half was held by Clarence through his wife, Anne’s sister Isabel, and now the couple stalled Anne’s attempts to assert her rights. She wrote to Queen Elizabeth, the Duchess of York, Princess Elizabeth and Jacquetta, Duchess of Bedford to try to persuade them to intercede with her with the King, who refused to allow her safe conduct to make her case in court. They did nothing. Isabel was now a part of the royal family, with Clarence’s treachery officially forgotten — for the moment, at least — and Anne, despite the fact that she had been pardoned, excluded from favour. The Countess of Warwick did little to help her daughter, and indeed there was little she could do, as the Warwick earldom had been attaindered. If Anne could marry, she would have a champion to uphold her rights, but she needed a partner powerful enough to counter Clarence’s influence. The natural choice was Edward IV’s second brother, Richard of Gloucester.

  It has been suggested that Anne and Richard had actually fallen in love when Richard was a member of the Earl of Warwick’s household in his teens, yet though they knew each other well, having grown up together, their marriage was one of mutual convenience, a convenience Anne was the first to perceive. The Clarences were opposed to Anne making any marriage, as that would mean they would have to give up their claim to her half of the inheritance, but when, after a Christmas visit by Richard, they suspected Anne’s precise intentions, they were furious. The Milanese ambassador confirmed the gossip that Clarence opposed a match because ‘his brother King Edward had promised him Warwick’s country, he did not want [Gloucester] to have it by reason of marriage with the Earl’s second daughter’. 1 The Croyland Chronicle is responsible for the famous story that the Clarences disguised Anne as a kitchen maid in their London home at Coldharbour to prevent Richard from carrying her off, and though the type of costume is unlikely, the idea that they attempted to hide her is deemed plausible. Somehow, Anne got the better of them and between December 1471, when Richard arrived in London, and February 1472, when her presence is recorded there, she defiantly fled the Clarences’ house and took sanctuary at St Martin’s, near St Paul’s Cathedral.

  Anne’s escape was a courageous, if not strictly romantic act, but its object may seem psychologically repugnant to a modern mind. Leaving aside the rather tiresome matter of Richard III’s true appearance (he may have been born with teeth but he was probably not hunchbacked, let alone the deformed creeping gargoyle of hammier Shakespearean representation), how could Anne have countenanced marriage to the man who was responsible, perhaps personally, for her husband’s death? This is simply the wrong question. Rather, how could Anne have chosen to ignore the fact that marriage to Richard was deeply sinful? Richard and Anne were both distantly related to Prince Edward, they were first cousins once removed and brother and sister-in-law. The papal degrees were often treated as no more than tedious necessities requiring dispensation, but in this instance Anne’s relationship with her intended husband was considered genuinely incestuous. To anyone with a conscience in the late fifteenth century, it was just plain wrong. But Anne was clearly desperate, as was borne out by the fact that she was prepared to accept no dower when the marriage and inheritance settlement was finalised in 1474.

  Anne’s wedding to Richard was simple enough for it to have left no record, but it probably took place in the spring of 1472, since in April that year a dispensation granting them licence in the third and fourth degrees of kinship was granted (though this was not in itself sufficient to validate the marriage). Anne had been living under Richard’s protection since leaving sanctuary after Clarence grudgingly consented to the match. The King attempted to reconcile the feuding brothers by declaring that they could divide the whole of the Warwick inheritance, to the disadvantage of the Countess, and acknowledged the inadequate dispensation by giving Richard his share for life in the event that he and Anne were obliged to divorce, which anticipatory claim confirms that his interests in the enterprise had little to do with affection for Anne. If the correct dispensation were sought and denied, it would also mean that any children ran the risk of being declared illegitimate, but once again Anne was prepared to face this possibility. Altogether, it was an ugly marriage, even for a time when marriage was essentially a matter of business. Anne colluded with her husband in cheating her mother of her rights, and entered knowingly into a marriage that risked disgraceful dissolution. But it was also a successful union, in that both parties got what they wanted, even if that was not necessarily one another.

  As well as wealth, Anne brought Richard a dowry that would prove essential in his eventual rise to power, the Neville affinity of the northern march. Anne’s great-grandfather, Ralph, Earl of Westmoreland, had married as his second wife a daughter of John of Gaunt by Katherine Swynford, Joan Beaufort. His elder son by his royal bride, Anne’s grandfather Richard, Earl of Salisbury, came to hold the wardenship of the west march against the Scots and, along with their rivals, the Percies, the Nevilles governed what was almost a mini-kingdom on the northern border. The power strugg
les of the two great families had played an influential part in the turmoil leading to the deposition of Henry VI. Now, with Warwick gone, Richard claimed the Earl’s northern allegiances as his own. Recognising the potency of the Neville association, Edward made Richard his regent in the north from 1472, formalising his position with an appointment to lieutenant general in 1480. The couple, especially Anne, spent much of their time during the first decade of their marriage at Middleham, in modernday Wensleydale, and though the eleventh-century castle there is a ruin, it remains impressive even today. It was at Middleham (according to local lore, in the southwest tower), that their son Edward was born in the mid-1470s.

  Records of Anne’s activities until 1483 are extremely scant. She represented her husband at York during his absence in France in 1475—6, and it may be assumed she did so on other occasions, just as it may be assumed she conducted her household in the typical, unexceptional manner of other great ladies of her class. The nature of her relationship with Queen Elizabeth is unknown, but their stories entwine again in the summer of 1483. Edward IV fell sick at the end of March that year, and on 9 April he died at Westminster. Anne did not arrive in London until 5 June. How much she knew of her husband’s plans at this point is uncertain, but the fact that she did not make this journey sooner suggests she was aware that the planned coronation of Prince Edward was not going to take place in May, as scheduled. Indeed, it was just a few weeks later that Anne found herself once again in the position of prospective Queen of England.