Blood Sisters (7 page)

Cecily was not writing only to congratulate Marguerite – nor even to lament the infirmity of her own ‘wretched body’. She was indeed recovering from the birth of her son Richard, of which Thomas More
²²
wrote that it was a breech birth and the mother could not be delivered ‘uncut’. But it was her husband’s fall from favour that caused her to be ‘replete with such immeasurable sorrow and heaviness as I doubt not will of the continuance thereof diminish and abridge my days, as it does my worldly joy and comfort’. She would have sued to Marguerite earlier had not ‘the disease and infirmity that since my said being in your highness presence hath grown and groweth’ caused her ‘sloth and discontinuance’. In this long, elaborate and convoluted letter Cecily renewed the plea she had made at Hitchin: that her husband the Duke of York should no longer be ‘estranged from the grace and benevolent favour of that most Christian, most gracious and most merciful prince, the king our sovereign lord’.

It is not known whether York had asked Cecily to intercede, or whether she did so on her own initiative. The lists of gifts made by Marguerite each year show presents being made to Cecily and her servants; this can be interpreted as a less politically coded conduit to the husband, or as an expression of female alliance. Either way, Cecily’s letter may have had some effect. When a great council was summoned that autumn York did, belatedly, receive an invitation to attend; one of the signatories on the document was Marguerite’s confessor.

The council was summoned by Margaret Beaufort’s uncle, Somerset, on 24 October. Recently, several important things had happened. On 19 October the French king’s forces had entered Bordeaux, leaving England only Calais as a foothold in France and ending the Hundred Years War with France’s resounding victory. On the 13th Queen Marguerite had given birth to a healthy baby boy, named Edward after Edward the Confessor, whose feast day it was. But while proclamations of the joyous news were read around the country, at court the joy was muted. For the man to whom the news should have been most welcome of all, the baby’s father, Henry VI, had been for some weeks in a catatonic stupor.

It had been the middle of August when the king, after complaining one evening of feeling unusually sleepy, had woken the next morning with lolling head, unable to move or to communicate with anybody. Over the days and weeks ahead, as his physicians and priests tried the full panoply of fifteenth-century remedies – bleedings, purgings and cautery on the one hand, exorcism on the other – he seemed not entirely to lose consciousness but to be utterly incapable. Modern medicine has tentatively diagnosed his condition as catatonic schizophrenia, or a depressive stupor, triggered by the news from France or just possibly by the fact of Marguerite’s pregnancy. Every effort was made at first to conceal the king’s condition, not only from the country at large but specifically from York.

It was in this climate that, as custom dictated, Marguerite had withdrawn into her apartments at Westminster to await her child’s birth; it was an all-female world which not even her priest was allowed to enter. Never can withdrawal from the wider world have seemed less timely. After the birth – and the churching or ceremony of religious purification some forty days later at which Marguerite, wearing a robe trimmed with more than five hundred sables, was attended by the duchesses not only of Suffolk and Somerset but also of York – she had to accept the fact that Henry in his catatonic state could make no sign of acknowledging the baby as his. This represented both a personal slight and a practical problem if the name of the little prince were to be invoked as nominal authority for a council to rule during his father’s incapacity.

There would, perhaps inevitably, be rumours about the baby’s paternity – whispers that Marguerite had been guilty of adultery with the Duke of Somerset. If it were indeed the news of Marguerite’s pregnancy that had triggered the king’s collapse, the question is whether he was horrified by the first indisputable evidence of his own sexuality or, conversely, by awareness that the child could not be his and that his wife must have been unfaithful.

By the traditions of courtly love, adultery could be a forgivable, even laudable, route to emotional fulfilment. Guinevere was guilty of adultery with Lancelot while her husband Arthur, soon to fall into his own magic sleep below the lake, stood by; but because Guinevere was Lancelot’s true lover, she was able to be redeemed. In the world of practical politics, however, it was a different story. When chroniclers such as Robert Fabian wrote that ‘false wedlock and false heirs fostered’ were the ‘first cause’ of the ills in the body politic, they were making an equation between private morality and public wellbeing which would have seemed reasonable to any contemporary.

The whispers of unfaithfulness would rise to a crescendo of public debate towards the end of the decade, when Marguerite’s Yorkist enemies found it convenient both to discredit the Lancastrian heir and to cast a slur on Marguerite herself in the field in which women were above all judged: her chastity. As Catherine de’ Medici would later warn Elizabeth I, her sexuality was always the way in which a powerful woman could be most successfully attacked. Christine de Pizan similarly suggested that a queen had less freedom of sexual action than a lower-ranking woman, for ‘the greater a lady is, the more is her honour or dishonour
²³
celebrated through the country’. But the birth of Prince Edward transformed Marguerite, the first of several women in this story for whom their sons would be the ones to play. She would now not be prepared to sit back and allow others to rule – as her husband all too patently could not – the country.

In January 1454 it was reported that the queen, ‘being a manly woman, using to rule and not be ruled’, had drawn up a bill of five articles ‘whereof the first is that she desires to have the whole rule of the land’, so a Paston correspondent wrote. There was no very recent precedent in England for a woman’s rule, or indeed a formal regency. Though several of the early Norman queens
²⁴
had acted as regent, memories of the last woman to hold the reins of power, Isabella of France a century before, were not reassuring. Marguerite’s mother-in-law Katherine de Valois had taken no part in government during Henry VI’s minority.

But across the Channel there was precedent aplenty. Maybe it helped that the French had regularised their position by ‘discovering’ an ancient tradition that a woman could not inherit. The Salic law, while it debarred a woman from the throne itself, conversely enabled her to get near the throne without seriously imperilling the status quo. Marguerite’s family tradition was of women taking control when necessary; but there was severe disapproval for a woman who crossed the indefinable boundary and seemed to seek rule openly. Perhaps Marguerite’s very bid, influenced by the experience of her continental family, would have repercussions when, almost thirty years later, the governors of England came to consider a Woodville queen’s position during another prospective regency.

Discussions as to how the country should be ruled dragged on for weeks, in parliament and in the council chamber, which suggests that Marguerite’s claim was not instantly dismissed. At the end of February, both she and York were scheduled to make grand public arrivals in London. The mayor and aldermen agreed to turn out in scarlet to give the queen a formal welcome on Wednesday – and to do the same for the Duke of York on Friday. In the end, however, in the last days of March it was decided that the country would be governed during the king’s incapacity by a council of nobles with York as ‘protector’ at their head. It was solution to which all the men involved – even Henry VI’s half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor – could agree.

York was described also as ‘defensor’ of the realm – a military role that could only have been held by a man. While Somerset was disempowered – arrested in the queen’s apartment – Marguerite was sent to Windsor to be with her husband: a wife, not a force in the land. She seemed, however, to accept the decision, even when the council’s money-saving reforms reduced her household and thus her power base. It is hard, indeed, to know what else she could have done. Certainly she could not stress Henry’s incapacity: she had no authority to act other than through him. Although some lords refused to serve on York’s council on the grounds that they were ‘with the queen’, either physically or otherwise, the normal business of administration seemed – except only for the continued opposition of Somerset – to be going comparatively smoothly.

Then, on Christmas Day 1454, Henry recovered his senses. On 28 December the queen brought her son to him and told him the baby’s name, and, in the words of the Paston letters, ‘he held up his hands and thanked God therefore’. Another account has it that he also, unhelpfully, said the child ‘must be the son of the Holy Spirit’, which could not but fan the flames of doubt about the boy’s paternity.

The king’s recovery was hailed with relief by all; in reality, it only presented a new set of problems. York had been a capable governor, but the king’s recovery also resurrected Somerset, boiling with fury, while the weakened Henry would henceforth be more susceptible than ever to petticoat government. York could only ride back to his own estates for safety and with him, in spirit if not in person, came Cecily’s brother Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, and Neville’s eldest son, the Earl of Warwick – the man who has gone down in history as ‘the Kingmaker’ and whose wife would two years later give birth to the most obscure female protagonist in this story, Anne.

Up until the 1450s the Neville family had continued to support the Lancastrian government, to which they were linked by the connections of Joan Beaufort. Cecily, married to York, must have found herself isolated within her own family. This situation had now begun to change, largely because of the repercussions of a feud with another great northern family, the Percy earls of Northumberland. The two divisions of the Neville family were coming to be on opposite sides. Cecily, the former ‘Rose of Raby’, was now closest to the Nevilles of Middleham, Salisbury and Warwick, who were aligning themselves with her husband; while her half-nephew Ralph, who held the Raby land and the Westmorland title, remained Lancastrian. Whatever the cause, the change of allegiance in at least some of her kin must have been welcome to Cecily.

In May 1455 the queen and Somerset held another great council charged with protecting the king ‘against his enemies’. It is from this month that many historians date the start of the ‘Cousins’ War’. The stand-off between the two parties quickly gave way to armed conflict as the king (supported by Somerset, though not by the queen, who had retreated to Greenwich with her baby) rode out of London at the head of a royal army and York likewise mustered his forces. The battle of St Albans was no major military engagement – an hour-long fracas through the market place and the town’s main street – but it was notable for two things. Contemporaries were shocked, not only that the victorious Yorkist soldiers had looted their way through an English town, but that the king had been slightly wounded by an arrow from one of his English subjects. A number of lords and gentlemen on the royal side were slain, among them the Duke of Somerset, cut down by an axe outside the Castle Inn. Once again Marguerite had lost her great ally (and Margaret Beaufort her uncle, and the head of her family).

York’s and the Nevilles’ was the victory. But the battle of St Albans was significant in yet another way. There may have been no clear-cut turning-point in Marguerite of Anjou’s progress towards political activism, but this was surely the moment when the process was completed.
²⁵

With a few exceptions, the battlefield was not part of a lady’s experience in the fifteenth century. Some thirty years before, legend had it, Margaret’s grandmother Yolande had donned silver armour and led her troops against the English at the battle of Baugé. But though the century of Joan of Arc may have given lip service to the idea of the woman warrior, even Isabella of Castile, Katherine of Aragon’s mother, who was often pictured leading her own troops into battle, in fact confined herself to strategy and the supply of arms, planning and provisioning. Certainly most of the ladies whose husbands or sons were involved in wars would not have heard about events for days or even weeks afterwards. News travelled only at a horse’s pace; and in an age before mass media (before, even, the dissemination of official printed reports) they may never have known as much about the progress of each battle as is known today. The history of the ‘Wars of the Roses’ has usually been told in terms of the men who alone could take part in its physical conflicts. But the lives of the women behind them could be affected no less profoundly.

As the Yorkists took over the reins of government, there was no overt breach of loyalty – everything was done in the king’s name. Past wrongs were blamed on the dead Somerset and his allies. But Marguerite at least was mistrustful and unhappy, again leaving the court to take refuge in the Tower with her baby. The fact that Henry resumed his role as king almost as York’s puppet must have frightened as well as angered her. That autumn the king fell ill again, though this time only for three months, and from November 1455 to February 1456 York resumed his protectorship of the country.

But as York set about a policy of financial retrenchment, the queen was working to try and make the king’s rule more than nominal. ‘The queen is a great and strong laboured woman, for she spares no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion to her power’, wrote one observer, John Bocking, a connection of the Paston family. Early in 1456, as the king’s recovery put an end to York’s protectorship, Marguerite herself left London, taking her baby son to the traditional Lancastrian stronghold of Tutbury. She had decided to take action, rallying support and persuading the king to remove the court from London to the Midlands, where her own estates lay. In September of that year her chancellor was entrusted by the king with the Privy Seal, which gave her access to the whole administration of the country.