Blood Sisters (46 page)

37
pillaged the land:
There is a theory that the whole saga of Marguerite’s indifference and her soldiers’ outrage originated as Yorkist propaganda. See Cron’s article ‘Margaret of Anjou and the Lancastrian March on London 1461’.

38
the ladies were Ismanie, Lady Scales … :
That, at least, is the consensus view, though Cron’s article (see above) demonstrates how this is a good example of the way information has often to be pieced together from diverging sources. The
Great Chronicle of London
mentions Jacquetta and Lady Scales but not Anne; the
Annales
once attributed to the antiquary William Worcester and the
Calendar of State Papers Milan
mention Anne and Jacquetta but not Lady Scales: another source, the so-called
English Chronicle
edited by Davies, has Anne alone.

39
her eldest daughter Elizabeth:
The name of Domina Isabella (the Latin ‘Elizabeth’) Grey occurs among the ladies attending Queen Marguerite at a point when (in so far as the records allow a guess at dates to be made) the young Elizabeth Woodville had probably recently been married to the Lancastrian John Grey. This reference may well describe another lady; none the less, Thomas More would mention Elizabeth’s service with Marguerite as a fact. The nineteenth-century writer Prévost d’Exiles relates a romantic story that Elizabeth had accompanied her husband on the campaign and was, before St Albans, persuaded by Marguerite to visit Warwick’s camp as the queen’s spy.

40
The Bishop of Elphin … sets the glad tidings later:
Calendar of State Papers Venetian
, p. 103; also
Calendar of State Papers Milan
, pp. 65–6.

Part II 1461–1471

1
the lands held by his father:
See
Calendar of Patent Rolls Edward IV 1461–67
, p. 131 (1 June 1461), an extremely extensive list of properties (with their ‘advowsons, wards, marriages, escheats … warrens, chases, fairs, markets, fisheries, liberties, wrecks of sea’) granted to Cecily for life ‘in full recompense of her jointure’. A later grant describes her holding properties, which carried with them the right to hold a three-weekly court, ‘as fully as the king’s father had them’. See also
Calendar of the Close Rolls Edward IV, vol. i, 1461–68
, p. 73.

2
couple were estranged:
When in 1461 Exeter was forced to flee abroad and was attainted, his wife was granted the bulk of his lands; and if this favour came at a price (in 1466 she was required to allow her heiress daughter to marry a son of Queen Elizabeth Woodville), no doubt she felt it was well worth paying.

3
another … issue would raise its head:
see p. 155 below. The possibility of Edward’s having been already married is explored at length in Ashdown-Hill’s
Eleanor: The Secret Queen
; see also Crawford,
Yorkists
, pp. 178–9.

4
‘to love together’:
Against that, an unsanctioned love match in 1469 of Margery Paston with Richard Calle, the family’s bailiff, had, her mother claimed, ‘struck sore at our hearts’. The bishop hauled in to adjudicate, who by no means thought such a matter too light for him, assured Margery that if she persisted in claiming this marriage, none of her friends would receive her – ‘remember’, Margery’s mother Margaret urged her son, ‘that we have lost of her but a brothel, and set it less to heart …’. Love within an agreed marriage was of course another, wholly desirable, thing. A letter in the
Stonor Papers
, from a partner in the firm who had been betrothed to a teenaged Stonor daughter not yet deemed ready to complete the match: ‘when I remember your youth, and see well that you are no eater of your meat, which would help you greatly to grow, forsooth then you make me very heavy again. And therefore I pray you, my own sweet cousin, even as you love me, to be happy and eat your meat like a woman. And if you will do so for my love, look what you will desire of me, whatsoever it may be, and by my truth I promise by the help of our Lord to perform it to the best of my power.’ The messages here are potentially mixed, of course – but the young Katherine was sufficiently content with her lot to show a ‘responsible loving dealing’ towards her future partner.

5
The only Englishwoman to become queen consort since the Conquest:
The closest comparisons would probably be with Matilda of Scotland, wife of Henry I, whose mother came from a Saxon royal house; and Joan of Kent, who made a controversial marriage with the Black Prince, son of Edward III. It could not, however, be held against Matilda that she was not of royal stock; while the Black Prince died before he became king, or Joan queen.

6
Cecily elaborated her title:
Chamberlayne ‘A paper crown’; see also Crawford,
Yorkists
, pp. 175–6.

7
until de Brezé found her:
Nor were her dramatic adventures over. When she and her son, with de Brezé, had ridden back into Scotland, they fell into the hands of an English spy called Cook who planned to take her to Edward IV. Cook’s confederates overpowered the men, dragged them all into a rowing boat and put out to sea where, as dawn broke, Marguerite was able surreptitiously to loosen de Brezé’s bonds so that he was able to overpower Cook and they got away.

8
A queen was allowed … to exercise influence:
Men, of course, exercised influence as well, but they had more formalised rules also, which meant that the dangerous, mistrusted interaction of the political and the personal was one step further away.

9
Messengers … bringing instructions from Marguerite:
Malory’s biographer Christina Hardyment postulates (
Malory
, p. 419 ff) that he may have been employed as a go-between.

10
Woking:
In December 1468 the Staffords invited the king to visit Woking; perhaps it was to calm frayed nerves, and to signal continued good intentions, that he accepted. He hunted in the deer park and dined in the hunting lodge under a canopy of purple sarcenet, on a pewter dinner service brought down from London by a hostess who had purchased velvet and Holland cloth to dress for the occasion. The party ate pike, wildfowl, thirteen lampreys and seven hundred oysters, with ‘half a great conger for the king’s dinner’.

11
‘
Worcester’:
The chronicler once mistakenly identified as the fifteenth-century antiquary William of Worcester, and now often known as ‘pseudo-Worcester’.

12
Clarence’s mother Cecily had now told him this was true:
Jones,
Bosworth
, p. 73. Militating against the theory that Cecily here fell out with Edward is (as Joanna Laynesmith points out in the article cited in the next note) the fact that in a time of danger soon afterwards – a time when he had, however, been reconciled with Clarence – Edward took his family for safety to his mother’s house; and that Cecily was recorded as taking part in several family ceremonials in the years ahead. As several writers have also reflected, however, within the context of a family irritation is not the same thing as total alienation – now or in the fifteenth century.

13
Cecily and her daughters … working:
Like so much concerning Cecily’s role in the Clarence saga this seems to be, as Jane Austen put it, ‘a truth universally acknowledged’ rather than one for which it is possible to produce actual proof. For discussion of that role, see Laynesmith, ‘The Kings’ Mother’; also Jones,
Bosworth
, Chapter 3 for his theory as to Cecily’s motives in travelling to Sandwich to see Clarence as he set off for Calais and marriage with Warwick’s daughter.

14
Marguerite held out for fifteen days:
Shakespeare in
Henry VI Part 3
, Act 3, Scene 2 takes full dramatic licence to have Warwick change his allegiance, and Marguerite accept it, in half a dozen lines or the blink of an eye.

15
Commynes:
Philippe de Commynes or Commines (1447–
c.
1511) made the opposite journey to that of Jean de Waurin. Born in Flanders, he wound up in the service of the French king Louis XI (at which court he may have met the exiled Henry Tudor). His
Mémoires
reflect the insider’s view of international relations that he gained in his career as a diplomat, while his analytical style has seen him dubbed ‘the first truly modern writer’.

16
his force met Warwick’s at Barnet:
The reports of the battle serve as a good example of how news spread. The battle of Barnet started at dawn 12 miles outside London. Wild rumours were abroad early and by 10 a.m. the city was hearing tales of Edward’s victory, but these were disbelieved until, the
Great Chronicle of London
says, a rider raced through the streets displaying one of Edward’s own gauntlets, sent as token to his queen. A Norfolk man claimed to have seen the bodies of Warwick and Montague at St Paul’s that morning. Wanting to be the first to deliver the news back home, he took a boat after dinner, about twelve, but was captured at sea by merchants of the Hanseatic league and taken to Zeeland where his story was quickly taken to Margaret of Burgundy at Ghent. Margaret wrote a letter describing it to her mother-in-law and presumably also to her husband – who, however, was also getting erroneous news that Edward IV had been killed.

17
womanly behaviour … of the Queen:
Agnes Strickland’s early Victorian
Lives of the Queens of England
claimed that Elizabeth’s ‘feminine helplessness’ had drawn forth a ‘tender regard’ for her throughout the realm, in contrast to the effect produced by the ‘indomitable spirit’ of Marguerite of Anjou. The comparison might be phrased differently today, but contemporaries clearly agreed.

Part III 1471–1483

1
Cecily … ‘sore moved’ Sir John to sell her the place:
Castor,
Blood and Roses
, p. 119. She had, after all, grown up in far less commodious establishments: Raby was a palace-cum-fortress rebuilt almost a century earlier, with towers and apartments irregularly grouped round courtyards.

2
disguised as a kitchen maid:
If that sounds too much like Cinderella in the fairy story, it should be remembered not only that Marguerite is supposed to have travelled disguised as a servant, but that in the turmoils of the 1440s Alice Chaucer had had to go to Norwich disguised ‘like a housewife of the country’.

3
the dispensation:
Anne’s biographer Michael Hicks (
Anne Neville
, p. 143 ff) has written on what he believes to be the invalidity of the dispensation and therefore of the marriage; clearly not a subject of debate at the time, but casting an interesting light on Richard’s attitudes.

4
any other choices:
And Hicks, for example (
Anne Neville
, p.111), though without citing actual evidence, portrays it as her own decision to marry Richard.

5
George Buck:
Sir George Buck, 1560–1622, James I’s Master of the Revels, Richard III’s first determined apologist, and author of the
History of King Richard the Third
. Buck’s account plays a significant part in the history of the next reign (see below, pp. 225–7) at which time it will, however, become clear that information from this source must be treated warily.

6
Rous:
John Rous, Rows or Roos (d. 1491), Warwickshire cleric and antiquary, the chronicler of Anne Neville’s family. His
Rous Roll
, a history of the earls of Warwick, warmly praised Anne’s husband, then on the throne as Richard III; later, however, his
History of the Kings of England
vilified the dead king just as ardently. It was this work that first saw the portrait, seized upon by Shakespeare, of a Richard who spent two years in his mother’s womb, emerging complete with teeth and long hair.

7
a declaration of trust:
Cecily, by contrast, spent the summer well away from the seat of power. A letter from Margaret Paston to her son John (
Paston Letters
vol. 5 p. 236) describes how ‘my Lady of Yorke and all her household is [
sic
] still here at St Bennet’s [an abbey near the Paston home of Mautby in Norfolk] and purposed to abide there still, till the king come from be yonder the sea, and longer if she like the air there’. The
Paston Letters
contain a number of references to Cecily; see, for example, vol. 3 pp. 110, 233, 366.

8
the reburial at Fotheringhay:
Sutton and Visser-Fuchs,
The Reburial of Richard Duke of York
.

9
simply watched the ceremony:
Sutton and Visser-Fuchs say Cecily was certainly conspicuous ‘for her absence, or for the failure of the texts to refer to her’. They speculate on the possibility that ‘Her status as the widow of a man who was being buried almost as a king may have created problems of precedence that were best resolved by her merely watching’; suggesting alternatively that she may have been absent from sickness ‘or choice’.