Blood Sisters (47 page)

10
Elizabeth Stonor writes:
Crawford,
Letters of Medieval Women
, pp. 75–7;
Stonor Letters
, pp. 269–71.

11
One letter perhaps written in 1474:
Crawford,
Letters of Medieval Women
, pp. 133–4. For the possible significance of Syon in the family dynamics, and the shared piety here reflected as a bond between Richard and Cecily, see Jones,
Bosworth
, p. 78. Crawford,
Yorkists
, p. 66, however, sees Edward IV’s later decision to call one of his youngest daughters Bridget, ‘a name almost unknown in England’, as a reflection of Cecily’s devotion to St Bridget of Sweden and the Bridgettine abbey of Syon. See note 20.

12
Cecily’s second daughter Elizabeth … access of independence:
The Paston letters suggest that John was perhaps dominated by his mother Alice; as possibly, at least in her younger years, was Elizabeth herself, who in any case would have been fairly well occupied with her childbearing. In 1468 the Pastons reported that Queen Elizabeth had been persuaded to write to ‘my lady of Norfolk and another letter unto my lady of Suffolk the elder’ – Alice. It is noteworthy that the Pastons first found it worth petitioning Elizabeth herself – to intercede in a land dispute – just after Alice’s death in 1475. But Elizabeth’s awareness of the need for status and finery continued to be at war with her and her husband’s comparatively low financial standing. Present when Edward made one of his few gestures to education, at Oxford in 1481, she could be found writing (in, most unusually for any fifteenth-century noblewoman, her own hand) to John Paston, asking if she might have the use of his rooms at Windsor. ‘For God’s sake, say me not nay.’

13
the ever-troublesome Scots:
Edward had the option of other marital plans as a peaceable way of dealing with the Scots. A letter of 1477 to his ambassador in Scotland replies to the Scots king’s suggestion that Clarence and his sister Margaret should marry a sister and brother of his own – despite the fact that Edward pleaded both were still in their period of ‘doule’ or mourning, and that until they were out of it he would not be able to ‘feel their dispositions’. It is, however, again a moot point whether he would have wished thus to advance his dangerous brother.

14
daughter of the great Earl of Shrewsbury:
Eleanor Butler was also, through her mother, niece by marriage to Warwick; and Shakespeare only echoes other sources in having Warwick cast up against Edward ‘th’abuse done to my niece’
Henry VI Part 3,
3.3; speaking also of the difficulty of this king’s being ‘contented by one wife’
ibid
4.3.

15
Thomas More … Elizabeth Lucy:
More also has Cecily, at the time of Elizabeth Woodville’s marriage to Edward and ‘under pretence of her duty towards God’, sending for Elizabeth Lucy and putting considerable, though ultimately unavailing, pressure on her to stake her prior claim. The idea of precontract was regularly encountered: the
Mirror for Magistrates
of 1559 would suggest that Humfrey, the old Duke of Gloucester, had attempted to prevent Marguerite of Anjou’s marriage on the grounds that Henry VI was precontracted to another lady.

16
as one author puts it:
Jones, whose theory this is, writes in
Bosworth
, p. 35, of ‘a far more collective sense of identity held by medieval society … As custodians of an historical pedigree, a family would together determine where the interests of its lineage lay and act to defend it.’

17
good ladyship:
Both letters in Crawford,
Letters of the Queens of England
, pp. 142–3; see also Crawford,
Letters of Medieval Women
, p. 238, for Cecily’s exercise of influence.

18
[Cecily] can be glimpsed:
See, e.g., the
Calendar of Patent Rolls Edward IV 1467–77
, pp. 89, 151; also
Edward IV and V and Richard III 1476–85
, pp. 218, 459, 522. See also
Calendar of Patent Rolls Edward IV and V and Richard III
, p. 441, and
Calendar of Papal Registers
, vol. 13, part I, pp. 106, 260.

19
A few years later:
English Historical Documents, vol. 4, 1327–1485
, p. 837 (from
A Collection of Ordinances and Regulations for the Government of the Royal Household
, ed. J Nichols, 1790), a record believed to have been made some time around 1485, which leaves it open to interpretation whether the events which first pushed Cecily to a religious retirement (if that were indeed the sequence of events) were those of 1478, 1483 or 1485 itself. It is the dwindling traces of her presence at court which inclines me to the earlier date.

20
Cecily had chosen … the mixed life:
See Armstrong, ‘The piety of Cicely Duchess of York’; see also Hughes,
The Religious Life of Richard III
, and Laynesmith, ‘The King’s Mother: Cecily Neville’.

21
she had it painted:
This work and a number of others mentioned, including the
Shrewsbury Book
and the
Beaufort Hours
, were shown in a British Library exhibition in 2011–12. See catalogue by McKendrick, Lowden and Doyle,
Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination
.

22
their mother too was a patron of Caxton’s:
Gregory, Baldwin and Jones,
The Women of the Cousins
’
War
, suggest (p. 135) she may be the noble lady who, in the interests of her daughters’ moral education, commissioned from Caxton a translation of the manual for young ladies,
The Book of the Knight of the Tower
.

23
her Victorian biographer Mary Ann Hookham:
Hookham also quotes the local historian of the nineteenth century, J.F. Bodin: ‘Her blood, corrupted by so many sombre emotions, became like a poison, which infected all the parts that it should nourish; her skin dried up, until it crumbled away in dust; her stomach contracted, and her eyes, as hollow and sunken as if they had been driven into her head, lost all the fire, which had, for so long a time, served to interpret the lofty sentiments of her soul.’

Part IV 1483–1485

1
his wishes no longer paramount:
This begs the question of whether deathbed codicils to Edward’s will (mentioned by both Crowland and Mancini but, if made, since lost) had in any case removed the powers formerly given to her.

2
even female:
The hint of Richard’s double prescience – both as to Edward V’s fate and Elizabeth of York’s future importance – cannot necessarily this time be put down to hindsight since Mancini’s narrative ended, with his visit, in the summer of 1483.

3
confided to his wife:
Anne’s role in events is one of the great imponderables. Shakespeare, in
Richard III
, Act 4, Scene 1, would have a scene of mutual lamentation when the three women – Elizabeth Woodville, Anne Neville and Cecily – get the first inkling of Richard’s plans. But there is no reason to assume this was the reality (it certainly failed to reflect the dissent between Elizabeth and her mother-in-law). Janis Lull, introducing the CUP edition of the play, notes on p. 9 that the triad has been compared to the lamentations of Helena, Andromache and Hecuba in Seneca’s
Troades
, and explores also the motif of the three Marys – Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome and Mary the mother of James – in the medieval Resurrection plays.

4
Margaret Beaufort’s ally:
Morton had been one of the protectors involved in the negotiation of Margaret Beaufort’s marriage settlements, as well as mediator to Edward IV in her attempt to get her son home.

5
On 16 June a delegation was sent:
Some sources, Mancini, Vergil and More among them, seem to suggest that the younger boy was surrendered before Hastings’ execution; however, the dispassionate evidence of a contemporary letter and an account book suggest the sequence of events followed here.

6
More’s pages need some decoding:
See note 22, p. 354.

7
Another view:
That of Jones in
Bosworth
: ‘The painful turmoil of 1469 was to be mirrored in 1483, as Richard succeeded where Clarence had failed. And as King Richard struggled to overcome the threats from those who opposed this new Yorkist settlement, it was Cecily to whom he appealed for daily blessing in his enterprise. Her role was crucial.’ See Chapter 4, ‘The Search for Redemption’. It is Jones who cites as evidence the Archbishop’s register:
Registrum Thome Bourgchier, Cantanuariensis Archiepiscopi, AD 1454–1486
, ed. F.R.H. Du Boulay, Canterbury and York Soc., LIV, 1957, pp. 52–3. Jones also states (p. 91) that several decades later, in 1535, a conversation between the Spanish ambassador Chapuys and Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell showed that Cecily had made a written confession. The actual statement from Chapuys (CSP Foreign and Dom H8 viii, 281) is that he had told Cromwell that Henry, in seeking a divorce from Katherine of Aragon, was wrong to rely on the statutes of the realm, ‘which only depended on the prince’s wish, as might be seen by the Acts of King Richard, who … caused King Edward himself to be declared a bastard, and to prove it, called his own mother to bear witness, and caused it to be continually preached so’. From this Jones concludes that Cecily did indeed bear written evidence; that she did so before Shaa preached his sermon; and that she was in London to do it. But this may apportion more weight than Chapuys’ statement can really bear. Laynesmith in her article for the
Ricardian
of Autumn 2005, suggests as her own suspicion that Cecily ‘did not actively promote Richard’s accession, but equally did not oppose it either’. I would be inclined to agree. I am indebted to Dr David Wright for confirming my interpretation of the Latin
Register
.

8
The right of inheritance to the throne:
Even a hundred years later, when Elizabeth I was dying, there was – to quote the succession historian Nenner (
The Right to Be King
, p. 13) – no agreement as to how the next ruler should be chosen, let alone as to who he or she should be. No one knew ‘whether the crown ought to pass automatically at the death of Elizabeth to the next in the hereditary line; whether the next in the hereditary line might be passed over because of a “legal” incapacity to rule; whether the next monarch ought to be determined in parliament; or whether the queen should be exhorted in the waning days of her life to nominate her own successor’.

9
the grant of [Cecily’s] manors and lands:
Calendar of Patent Rolls Edward IV and V and Richard III
, p. 459.

10
The list of accounts:
Sutton and Hammond,
The Coronation of Richard III
.

11
Elizabeth Woodville … was so well pleased:
A phrase from Crowland is often cited, which might seem to suggest that Elizabeth had taken a very active and early part in the plotting: ‘many things were going on in secret … especially on the part of those who had availed themselves of the privilege of sanctuary’. But a fuller quotation describes specifically the people ‘of the South and of the West’ of the kingdom, ‘especially those people who, because of fear, were scattered without franchises and sanctuaries’.

12
Margaret was on the point of sending … Christopher Urswick:
In the end, another messenger would be sent to Brittany, with ‘a good great sum of money’ raised by Margaret in the city. This next messenger, interestingly, was one Hugh Conway, who had connections not only to Edward IV’s household but to the Stanleys.

13
an outside candidate for villain:
If the Duke of Buckingham had had the boys killed, then (as Buckingham would surely have calculated) Richard might indeed have hesitated at least in the short term to publish the news of their deaths; though one must still ask why did he not do so later. Henry VII, when the time came, might well have kept a similar silence. If this were true the guilty man, after all, was nominally one of Henry’s supporters – one of his mother’s close allies.

14
historians from Vergil and More onwards:
Unless, just possibly, More broke off his history at the crucial point because he could no longer subscribe to what he had become convinced was a lie.

15
Candidates include … Margaret Beaufort:
See Maurer’s article, ‘Whodunit: The Suspects in the Case’ for an analysis of the evidence for the different candidates mooted (who in fact include even the boys’ mother Elizabeth Woodville). Margaret Beaufort is her personal favourite for the role.

16
by the vise [advice] of the Duke of Buckingham:
This comforting theory may have been the one to which Margaret of Burgundy persuaded herself to subscribe. Of the chroniclers associated with Burgundy, Molinet blamed Richard but Commynes put at least part of the guilt on Buckingham. Margaret may, alternatively, have assumed that any rumours of murder were exaggerated.