Blood Sisters (19 page)
Authors: Sarah Gristwood
When she had married Duke Charles in 1468 Margaret had entered a court, and a political system, where the duchess was expected to play a comparatively active role; this despite the fact that her new husband was more than a decade older than she, strongly committed to his own rule, ferocious in war and frequently absent. Attention at first was likely to have focused on her prime duty: the provision of heirs. This Margaret would, for unknown reasons, never manage, and Charles’s existing daughter Mary remained his sole heiress. But although before Margaret’s arrival he had told his subjects that his bride was ‘ideally shaped to bear a prince’, there is no sign of the frantic and reproachful flailings after a male heir in which Margaret’s great-nephew Henry VIII of England would indulge.
Only a few years into the marriage, records of their movements show that the couple were rarely together, though relations seem to have been amicable. With Charles at the wars Margaret none the less retained enough hope to make offerings to those saints associated with childbirth and fertility: St Waudru, St Margaret of Antioch, St Colette and St Anne. In 1473 she made an unusual two-month trip to a palace designated as a place of cure and recovery; her trouble may possibly have been the loss of a child.
Alone or in company with her stepdaughter (with whom, as with her mother-in-law, she seems to have got on well), Margaret travelled indefatigably, raising men and money for her husband’s campaigns, and receiving petitions and ambassadors in his frequent absences. Her secure position survived not only the childlessness which would destroy Henry VIII’s queens, but the political turmoils in England which cast into doubt her other prime function, as living guarantor of the Anglo–Burgundian alliance.
Duke Charles, having made his own truce with the French, had been fighting on his other frontiers throughout 1476. In the frozen January of 1477 came news – filtering only slowly through to his womenfolk, and to his foreign allies – that he was dead. Immediately, Louis of France laid claim to a significant part of his lands. It was lucky that Margaret at thirty-one already had considerable experience of the swift reverses of fortune. She and her stepdaughter (Mary as the new ruling duchess, and Margaret under the title of
Duchesse Mère
) acted together to summon the Burgundian parliament, the Estates General, and negotiate arrangements to satisfy the complaints they had had against the rule of Duke Charles; to urge the individual cities and provinces of Burgundy to resist the French invaders; and to buy diplomatic time by sending a letter pleading for the protection due to ‘widows and orphans’. (Louis’ first response was to suggest a marriage between the twenty-year-old Duchess Mary and his seven-year-old son the Dauphin – who, of course, had two years earlier been betrothed to Elizabeth of York as part of another peace treaty.)
In the course of a fraught spring and summer the two women would achieve what they had set out to do; but things got worse before they got better. Margaret and Mary had to cope with the arrest and execution, by the Estates, of their most trusted advisers. Margaret had also, like so many widows, to battle for her dower rights, withheld on the grounds that her brother had never paid all the dowry he had promised; eventually Mary intervened on behalf of a woman who, she said, had always held ‘our person and our lands and lordships in such complete and perfect love and goodwill that we can never sufficiently repay and recompense her’.
Nor were these Margaret’s only problems. First there was a whispering campaign against her, sponsored by the French king. Before her marriage he had spread rumours about her chastity. Now he was about to spread a different story, which would have repercussions in England. Secondly, her brother Edward would not send military support and risk his own rapport with (and pension from) the French, even though Louis was attacking her dower lands.
Margaret wrote to Edward in the strongest terms, protesting that he had once made her ‘one of the most important ladies in the world’ but she was now ‘one of the poorest widows deserted by everyone, especially by you’. She implored him to send a thousand or more English archers ‘to rescue me from the King of France who does his best to reduce me to a state of beggary for the rest of my days’. Margaret was deeply dissatisfied with her brother, who did no more than write to Louis on her behalf. As events would prove, she was not a woman to take dissatisfaction lightly.
She was not the only York sibling to feel aggrieved. Just two years after the triumphant symbolism of the Fotheringhay ceremony, the Yorkist dynasty and its matriarch Cecily were racked by the fate of her second surviving son.
Alas, I am the mother of these griefs;
Their woes are parcelled, mine is general.
Richard III
, 2.2
George, Duke of Clarence, had been a disaffected troublemaker for much of his brother’s reign. For ten years he had been Edward’s heir, which had given him an exaggerated sense of entitlement. He has gone down in history as, in Shakespeare’s words, ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’; and this reputation is bound up with the story of the women around him.
Clarence’s wife Isabel Neville had died at the end of 1476, less than three months after giving birth to a son. This baby, Isabel’s third living child, very shortly followed her, and (though the Tewkesbury chronicler definitely links the sad event to childbirth) rumours would soon accrue about the deaths of both mother and child.
The first effect of Isabel’s departure was to make Clarence an available widower. The Crowland chronicler reports that Margaret of Burgundy, ‘whose affections were fixed on her brother Clarence beyond any of the rest of her kindred’, now devoted her energies to reviving the old idea of a match between him and Mary of Burgundy. But, just as when the idea had first been mooted almost a decade earlier, King Edward refused his permission.
All the royal siblings may to some degree have been victims of the French king Louis, who was still trying to break up the anti-French alliance established between England and Burgundy. Now French envoys spread the story that Margaret and certain English lords were planning to have Mary kidnapped and taken to England to marry Clarence; and whispered into Edward’s ear the poisonous suggestion that Margaret and Clarence would then use Burgundian troops to seize the English throne. (Burgundy itself, in the person of Mary, had a claim to that crown – she was descended through her grandmother from John of Gaunt.) But within a couple of months of Duke Charles’s death Margaret and Mary were actively seeking the long-planned marriage between Mary and Maximilian, the Archduke of Austria and son of the Holy Roman Emperor, which finally took place in summer 1477 to the satisfaction of all parties immediately concerned.
But Clarence’s history must have made these malicious tales all too credible. Any suggestion of a stronger Anglo–Burgundian link could – assuming the stories had not been instituted by the French king himself – have broken the fragile peace with France and thrown that country back on its old alliance with the ever-troublesome Scots.
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But whatever the rumours, no intervention by either Louis or Margaret may have been necessary: Clarence had an almost unparalleled capacity for making trouble on his own.
In the spring of 1477 he was involved in two bizarre trials. At the first, one Ankarette Twynho, formerly a servant of Clarence’s wife but now perhaps in the Woodvilles’ sphere, was accused of having given Isabel poisoned ale – given, it was claimed, on 10 October, though improbably not causing death until 22 December. Two others were accused of having conspired with her to poison also Isabel’s baby, who died ten days later. Ankarette was snatched from her home by Clarence’s men and taken across three counties to Warwick, where he held sway. There, despite the absurdity of the charges, she was found guilty by a jury who later pleaded that Clarence had left them no choice, and executed on the spot.
A few weeks later, in an apparently unrelated case, three men were tried and convicted in London for ‘seeking the destruction of the King and Prince’, as Crowland reported, by seditious means but also by necromancy – witchcraft. At least one of the men was a close associate of Clarence’s, who later, in May, stormed out of the king’s council after having the men’s declarations of their innocence read. He was displaying a flagrant lack of respect for the due process of law, and also for the king’s authority. Crowland relates how Edward summoned the duke to Westminster and inveighed against his behaviour ‘as derogatory to the laws of the realm and most dangerous to judges and jurors throughout the kingdom’. The two had, as Crowland writes, come to look upon each other with ‘unbrotherly’ looks. In June, Clarence himself was arrested and sent to the Tower.
At the beginning of 1478 Clarence was attainted on a rhetorically elaborate charge of treasons past and present, and the parliamentary sessions in which he was tried began on 16 January. The date reflects the complicated life of the York family, for the previous day had seen, by contrast, a resplendent wedding ceremony. Early in 1476 the last Mowbray Duke of Norfolk had died, leaving only an infant daughter, Anne, and Edward had immediately seized on the heiress for betrothal to his younger son, Richard. Now, two years later, he had a good opportunity to have the marriage formally celebrated – despite the youth of the participants – in the presence of many of his nobles who had assembled for a very different purpose.
Elizabeth Woodville’s brother Anthony, Earl Rivers, led the little girl into the king’s Great Chamber where the whole court was gathered to receive her – a daunting experience for a five- or six-year-old. The next day, followed by a retinue of ladies and gentlewomen, she was led by Earl Rivers again, and the ‘Count of Lincoln’, son to Edward’s sister Elizabeth, in procession through the Queen’s Chamber, the king’s Great Chamber and the White Hall into St Stephen’s Chapel, hung with blue tapestry decorated with gold fleurs de lys, where the royal family waited under a canopy to receive her.
The king gave the bride away, largesse was flung to the crowd from gold and silver bowls brought in by the Duke of Gloucester, and a banquet, with Anne Mowbray honoured as Princess of the Feast, completed that day’s celebrations. A few days later there was a great tournament, at which the queen’s brother appeared as St Anthony the hermit, with a hermit’s house of black velvet – complete with a belltower and a bell that rang – built into his horse’s trappings. The little duchess had to award the prizes – assisted, in the interests of practicality, by the princess Elizabeth and a council of ladies.
But beneath all this ceremony the Mowbray marriage is noteworthy for the way it demonstrated Edward’s own sometimes cavalier attitude to the law. The king’s son had already been created Duke of Norfolk, anticipating presumably that it would be in the right of his tiny wife, and two Acts of Parliament were now passed to ensure that if she died before bearing children her lands would pass to her ‘husband’ rather than to her heirs-at-law. Anne Mowbray’s mother the Duchess of Norfolk, Elizabeth Talbot, urged or forced out of much to which she was entitled, seems barely to have figured in the wedding ceremony. Neither, of course, did the bridegroom’s uncle Clarence, imprisoned in the Tower only a few miles away. Convicted by parliament, Clarence was sentenced to death in the early days of February; and when Edward hesitated for ten days the Speaker of the Commons asked the House of Lords to impose the penalty. He was executed on 18 February – famously drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. Mancini wrote that ‘The mode of execution preferred in this case was, that he should die by being plunged into a jar of sweet wine’, and the story was considered plausible enough to be repeated all over Europe, by de Commynes and the
Great Chronicle
among others. Clarence’s daughter would be painted with a wine cask as an emblem on her bracelet. The wine has served to lend a note of comic horror to Clarence’s death – but the bare facts of the case open the door to a wealth of speculation, not least as to where the responsibility should lie.
Thomas More – writing in the next century, and always a detractor of Richard III (then still Duke of Gloucester) – claimed that some ‘wise men also ween that his drift, covertly conveyed, lacked not in helping forth his brother of Clarence to his death: which he resisted openly, howbeit somewhat (as men deemed) more faintly than he that were heartily minded to his wealth’. It is true that several of Richard’s men were in the parliament that nodded through the attainder (as well, of course, as many of the Woodvilles’ adherents); true too that, inheriting some of Clarence’s titles and offices as well as his place in the succession, he greatly benefited from Clarence’s fall. But so too did Edward, who got Clarence’s great estates and needed the money; Margaret Beaufort must have noted with interest that the Richmond earldom – which in 1471 had been granted to Clarence for his lifetime – was once again vacant. Almost everybody stood to gain from Clarence’s death.
Mancini placed the blame very differently, as a grievance that would fester and burst forth in 1483. Visiting England in Richard’s reign and perhaps susceptible to his propaganda, Mancini wrote that at this time ‘Richard Duke of Gloucester was so overcome with grief for his brother, that he could not dissimulate so well, but that he was overheard to say that he would one day avenge his brother’s death.’ He clearly blames the queen who had ‘concluded that her offspring by the king would never come to the throne, unless the duke of Clarence were removed; and of this she easily persuaded the king.’ Indeed, More too would postulate as another possible cause of Clarence’s fall ‘the Queen and the lords of her blood, which highly maligned the king’s kindred (as women commonly not of malice but of nature hate them whom their husbands love)’.
