Queens Consort (60 page)

Marguerite’s cause was now precisely defined. Until this point, she had obviously been acting in Prince Edward’s interests, but with this act her defence of his rights became official. Even operating under duress, it was despicably pathetic that Henry should have concurred with the annulment of his own son’s rights, and unsurprising that Marguerite refused to answer her weak husband’s summons to London. Instead she managed to get a ship for Scotland, where she negotiated with King James II for reinforcements and funds. On her own authority, she offered to trade the stronghold of Berwick for Scottish aid. Meanwhile, Somerset was active in the southwest, and the Percy lands in the north were still loyal. By December, the Lancastrian forces were gathered at Pontefract under the command of Somerset and Northumberland, while the Yorkists were holed up at York’s castle of Sandal near Wakefield.

The battle of Wakefield was a huge victory for the Lancastrians but a disaster for Marguerite’s reputation. One of her influential biographers has it that she led her troops in person (having boned up on her Livy — apparently her tactics mirrored those of Hannibal at Cannae), and had the head of the Duke of York brought to her, whereupon she slapped the dead face, stuck a paper crown on its head and spiked it on the gates of York. Shakespeare’s version, in
King Henry VI Part III
, has Marguerite stabbing York with her own hands. York did die on the battlefield, the Earl of Salisbury was executed at Pontefract and the heads of the losers were displayed on the walls of York, but Marguerite herself took no part in the Wakefield executions, though she may well have rejoiced at them. As in the case of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marguerite’s exceptional qualities not only counted against her posthumously but also with her contemporaries. What people were prepared to say and believe of her gives an insight into how she was perceived, and the aftermath of Wakefield portrayed her as terrifying.

Marguerite led her troops south, but lack of discipline and the perennial problem of supplies soon had the troops stripping the countryside. The Scottish soldiers had a fearsome reputation, and panic began to spread through the Midland counties.
The Croyland Chronicle
gives a picture of what was rapidly being seen less as a royal campaign than as a barbarian invasion from the north.

The northmen, being sensible that the only impediment was now withdrawn … swept onwards like a whirlwind from the north, and in the impulse of their fury attempted to overrun the whole of England. At this period too, fancying that everything tended to ensure them freedom from molestation, paupers and beggars flocked forth from those quarters in infinite numbers, just like so many mice rushing forward from their holes, and universally devoted themselves to spoil and rapine without regard for place or person … Thus did they proceed with impunity, spreading in vast multitudes over a space of thirty miles in breadth … covering the whole surface of the earth just like so many locusts.
¹²

Yorkist propaganda seized on Marguerite’s inability to control her advancing army, to the point where one historian suggests it was their ‘excesses’ that were decisive in the outcome of the conflict. As the Lancastrians made their lawless way down the country, Edward, Earl of March, now the Yorkist leader and heir apparent, encountered Jasper Tudor and his troops en route to Hereford. The battle of Mortimer’s Cross was the first of an impressive series of victories for the young Earl, and also provided the badge he was to adopt as the symbol of his house, the golden sun of York, inspired by what appeared to be three suns in the sky as the armies engaged. Owen Tudor was among the Lancastrian prisoners who were executed at Hereford after the battle. He was reported to have said, ‘That head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap,’ before the executioner gave the stroke.

The next confrontation came on 17 February 1461 at St Albans, where Warwick was faced with another Duke of Somerset. For all his subsequent reputation as a kingmaker, Warwick lost the battle, misplacing the captured King Henry in the process. Marguerite and Prince Edward were sheltering in the abbey, and Henry managed to make his way to join them, apparently quite unmolested. Two days later the Lancastrians were prepared to march for the gates of London. The city authorities were terrified that the soldiers would sack the town, and the lord mayor sent a deputation of aristocratic
ladies to negotiate the terms of entry. ‘The Duchess of Bedford … went to St Albans to the King, Queen and Prince, for to entreat for grace for the city,’ recorded
The London Chronicle
. ‘And the King and his council granted that four knights with four hundred men should go to the City and see the disposition of it, and make an appointment with the Mayor and the Aldermen.’ Unusually, this agreement was essentially negotiated between women, so it is disappointing that it proved such a strategic disaster. Marguerite and the Duchess of Bedford were very much on the same side (the Duchess and her husband, Lord Rivers, had, after all, been kidnapped by Warwick during preparations for the attack on Calais, and her son-in-law, John Grey, had just lost his life at St Albans), yet Lady Bedford and her companion Lady Buckingham were so convincing in conveying the fears of the Londoners that Marguerite, fearful of losing their goodwill, lost her nerve instead. She ordered her troops to retreat to Dunstable as a gesture of good faith and in doing so she may well have set the crown on Edward of March’s head. The panic inspired by the advance of the northmen had done its work and the mood of the citizens was staunchly pro-Yorkist, but Marguerite had the King and she had an army, as well as a group of loyal nobles within the city. The Duchess of Bedford has been praised for ‘saving’ London, but as far as her own side was concerned, it was an own goal.

In contrast with Marguerite, Edward of March proved himself quick and resolute at this moment of crisis. He joined forces with Warwick in the Cotswolds and together they entered London on 26 February. The people had had enough of Henry’s ditherings and they were exhausted by terror. Prince Edward was a child of seven, but Edward of March was a man, and a big, handsome, fighting man at that. An Italian correspondent reported that there was a ‘great multitude who say they want to be with him to conquer or die’. On 4 March, the nineteen-year-old Earl was proclaimed as King Edward IV.

The Lancastrian cause was not entirely lost at this juncture. If Marguerite were able to hold out, there was a good chance that Edward, perceived by many as a usurper, would waste his forces and his popularity pursuing her. Edward knew that he had to attack, and do so decisively. In mid-March he set off towards Yorkshire and at the end of the month the two sides met once more at Towton. Chronicle figures are notoriously misleading when it comes to the size of medieval armies, but in this case, even a conservative estimation of the numbers involved gives 50,000 men apiece to both Yorkists and Lancastrians. Towton was perhaps the bloodiest battle of a bloody century, though no eyewitness description has survived.
Perhaps the greatest asset the Yorkists had was Edward himself, who fought on foot after his cavalry was routed by Somerset and Lord Rivers. Prepared to go to the death beside his standard, he cut a magnificent figure in the hand-to-hand combat at the core of the battle, all the more so for the conspicuous absence of his opposite number. It was claimed that 28,000 men fell at Towton, and even if this figure is exaggerated, it was felt as a calamity, ‘a last, appalling commentary on the misrule of Henry VI’.
¹³

Edward IV was crowned at Westminster on 28 June, three months after Towton. Marguerite, Henry and Prince Edward were now in Scotland, from where, in April, Marguerite had made good her promise of giving up Berwick, which did nothing for her popularity even among Englishmen who were sympathetic. In fact, one of Marguerite’s greatest disadvantages had been her inability to understand the consensual structure of English society, particularly the vital role of the gentry in the shires whose support was essential to the crown in times of need. It was these lesser men, rather than great magnates like Warwick or Somerset, who were embittered by the local unruliness and financial instability that had threatened them throughout the 1450s, and Marguerite had alienated them from the beginning by her aggressively partisan approach. The recent wars had not been expressly fought to get rid of Henry, but many people were glad to see the back of Marguerite. She had also gained a bloodthirsty reputation, however undeservedly, and her mishandling of her northern troops had terrified many potential loyalists into the Yorkist camp.

However, Marguerite is to some extent a victim of hindsight. Just as Suffolk had been made the scapegoat for the disastrous losses of the 1440s, so Marguerite was blamed for her husband’s shortcomings. If Henry were to be a saintly figure, pious, humble and unworldly, then it was necessary for someone to take the responsibility for the whole mess of his reign, and many writers chose the traditional option of
chercher la femme
. Marguerite may not have been possessed of brilliant understanding but she was ‘a great and intensely active woman, for she spares no pains to pursue her business towards an end and conclusion favourable to her power’.
¹⁴
Moreover, unlike many of her contemporaries, such as her former chancellor Laurence Booth, who now became confessor to the new King, she had remained staunchly loyal to the cause of her husband and son. She had been dealt a dud hand with Henry, and perhaps, like Suffolk, should be ‘given credit for taking on an impossible job’.
¹⁵
Undaunted, she continued to battle for her rights for the next decade.

CHAPTER 17

ELIZABETH WOODVILLE

‘Neither too wanton nor too humble’

I
n July 1461 the new King set off on progress, to show himself to the people and emphasise his regal authority. Pausing to hunt in the forest of Whittlewood near Grafton in Northamptonshire, Edward met a young widow, Lady Elizabeth Grey, née Woodville, whose husband had died fighting for the Lancastrians at St Albans. Lady Grey had apparently deliberately thrown herself in the King’s path to beg for the restoration of her husband’s lands to provide for their two small sons. Thomas More later imagined the meeting: ‘This poor lady made humble suit unto the King that she might be restored unto such small lands as her late husband had given her in jointure. Whom when the King beheld and heard her speak, as she was both fair and of a good favour, moderate of stature, well made and very wise, he not only pitied her, but also waxed enamoured on her. And taking her afterward secretly aside, began to enter in talking more familiarly.’
¹

Beauty is a difficult quality to draw out from the evidence of medieval chroniclers, who attributed it to most women of high birth and particularly to many queens. Elizabeth Woodville seems to have been possessed of the genuine article, a feature her contemporaries found unsettling and for which she was rewarded and punished in equal measure. Even allowing for the stilted artistic style of the period, her portrait at Queens’ College, Cambridge is captivating, the delicacy of the mouth and chin contrasting with the large, dark, sensuous eyes, her blonde hair gathered beneath an elaborate headdress.

Though the sylvan meeting of the King and the ravishing supplicant owes a good deal to local legend, there is no doubt that Edward was utterly smitten. Elizabeth was beautiful enough for him to defy his mother, the Duchess of York, his chief commander, Warwick, and his council in order to possess her.

Elizabeth’s marriage to Edward IV was that extraordinary thing, a love match. It initiated a series of problems within the already tangled skein of ambition and political loyalties that knotted into the Wars of the Roses. It also created an ambiguous perception of the Queen and her family which persists until the present day. Was Elizabeth a low-born adventuress who promoted the interests of the Woodville family at the expense of the nation, or a passionately loyal wife who showed exceptional fortitude and skill in surviving two political revolutions to ensure the final survival of the Yorkist dynasty? Elements of both interpretations are periodically valid; perhaps neither Elizabeth’s accusers nor her apologists have fully taken her measure as an individual in exceptional circumstances, in exceptional times.

Elizabeth was one of fifteen children born to Jacquetta, the dowager Duchess of Bedford, and her second husband, Sir Richard Woodville. The status of her family was one of the principal sources of objection to her marriage to Edward in the ‘lethally competitive’
²
world of the fifteenth-century aristocracy. Traditionally the Woodvilles have been depicted as minor country gentry, living unostentatiously on their estates at Grafton in Northamptonshire, but a minimally attentive look at Elizabeth’s ancestors proves that this was far from being the case. Her mother, Jacquetta, was the daughter of Pierre, Count of St Pol, Conversano and Brienne, and Marguerite, daughter of Francesco de Balzo, Duke of Andrea in Apulia, who claimed descent from Charlemagne. Admittedly, her paternal lineage was of no particular distinction among the European aristocracy of the time, but the Counts of St Pol, on her mother’s side, were one of the most prestigious houses in Europe, as evinced by the magnificent marriage Pierre arranged for Jacquetta who, in 1433, married Henry V’s brother John, Duke of Bedford. Thus for two years, until Bedford’s death, Jacquetta was England’s second lady after her sister-in-law, Queen Catherine, and she was permitted to use her royal title until the end of her own life.

If Sir Richard’s ancestors were not quite so illustrious, they could hardly be termed obscure. They had held their land in Northamptonshire since the twelfth century and Richard’s father had served Henry V as an esquire of the body and Henry VI as seneschal of Normandy He was knighted on Palm Sunday 1426 in the same ceremony as Edward IV’s father, the Duke of York. Another post, the one that brought him into Jacquetta’s orbit, was chamberlain to the Duke of Bedford during his captaincy of Calais. When Jacquetta was widowed, she was granted her dowry in February 1436 on condition that she did not marry again without Henry VI’s permission. Nevertheless she and Richard married in a clandestine
ceremony the same year and the couple were forced to ask for a royal pardon, which they received in October 1437, the year of Elizabeth’s birth, subject to a huge fine of 1,000 pounds, which Jacquetta raised by selling property in the west country to Cardinal Beaufort. The circumstances of her parents’ marriage are interesting when compared with Elizabeth’s own story. Jacquetta and Richard were prepared to defy royal authority to marry, and did so in hurried secrecy. That they were pardoned so quickly suggests the King held them in high regard, and the fact that the dower agreement, marriage and the granting of the pardon took place in such a short space of time indicates that Richard and Jacquetta truly loved each other, that they took a serious gamble, and that they won.