Blood Sisters (9 page)

The chronicler Polydore Vergil says that the queen (who was ‘for diligence, circumspection and speedy execution of causes, comparable to a man’) believed a plan was afoot to put the Duke of York on the throne itself: ‘Wherefore this wise woman [called] together the council to provide remedy for the disordered state of things… .’ At a meeting of the council in Coventry in the summer of 1459 York, Warwick and their adherents were indicted for their non-appearance ‘by counsel of the queen’. Nominally, of course, the council was the king’s council, and it was he who was still ruling the country. But the queen’s dominance must have made it hard for many a loyal Englishman to be sure just where his loyalties lay.

The anonymous
English Chronicle
declares that now was the moment when the Yorkists worked hardest to spread rumours. ‘The queen was defamed and denounced, that he that was called prince, was not her son, but a bastard gotten in adultery; wherefore she, dreading that he should not succeed his father in the crown of England, sought the alliance of all the knights and squires of Cheshire, to have their benevolence, and held open household among them.’

In the context of armed conflict Marguerite was far from negligible, but here too she could only act by proxy. One chronicle describes how it was ‘by her urging’ that the king – nominally – assembled an army. But as that army met the York/Neville forces in the autumn of 1459 at Blore Heath, Marguerite could only wait for news a few miles away. That news included the fact that Thomas, Lord Stanley, whose forces had been promised to her, had in fact held them neutral and outside the fray. It was after this battle that Marguerite reputedly told a local blacksmith to put the shoes of her horse on backwards, to disguise her tracks as she rode away. Shakespeare’s Clarence in
Henry VI Part 3
mocks ‘Captain Margaret’; but in fact the inability to fight in person would be a problem of female rule even for Elizabeth I in the next century. Christine de Pizan wrote that a baroness should know the laws of arms and the tactics necessary to defend her castle against attack; her queen, however, was expected to take a more passive role. Even at the Paston level a man could be found sending his wife to preserve their claim to the house; and she ordering crossbows. But Margaret Paston was eventually to find that ‘I cannot well guide nor rule soldiers’, who did not heed her as they would a man.

Nevertheless Marguerite’s influence was powerful. When the two armies faced off outside Ludlow a fortnight or so later, one source records that the Lancastrian soldiers would fight ‘for the love they bare to the King, but more for the fear they had of the Queen, whose countenance was so fearful and whose look was so terrible that to all men against whom she took displeasure, her frowning was their undoing and her indignation their death’. On this occasion the Yorkist forces ultimately backed off from armed conflict with their monarch, and the resultant flight has come to be called the rout of Ludford Bridge.

Warwick and Salisbury fled to Calais where their family was waiting. With them went Edward, Earl of March, the eldest son of York and Cecily. York himself and his second son, Edmund, fled to Ireland. Cecily and her younger children had most likely remained at Ludlow: a comfortable castle, since the residency there of York’s two eldest sons had ensured it was full of the fifteenth-century luxuries of chimneys, window glass and privacy, but now no sanctuary. Several sources record that she and her two youngest sons were taken prisoner there but it was never likely that any personal, physical reprisal would be taken against her, a woman. One chronicle does say that while the town of Ludlow was robbed to the bare walls ‘the noble Duchess of York unmanly and cruelly was entreated
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and [de]spoiled’, but the absence of any other sign of outrage suggests that the damage was only to her property.

When a parliament held at Coventry – packed with Marguerite’s supporters, and later known as the ‘Parliament of Devils’ – attainted the Yorkist lords, Cecily went to the city on 6 December and submitted.
Gregory’s Chronicle
recorded that: ‘The Duchess of York came unto King Harry and submitted her unto his grace,
³²
and she prayed for her husband that he might come to his answer to be received unto his grace: and the king full humbly granted her grace, and to all hers that would come with her… .’ Attainder meant not only that the men were convicted of treason, but that their lands were now the property of the crown. Cecily, however, was given a grant of a thousand marks per annum – income derived from some of those confiscated lands – ‘for the relief of her and her infants who had not offended against the king’.
³³
Her sister-in-law the Countess of Salisbury was personally attainted;
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Cecily was not. She was placed in custody; but the custodian was her own sister Anne, Duchess of Buckingham, whose husband had declared for the queen’s side and who seems to have kept her own natal Lancastrian sympathies. It is speculated that the comparative leniency with which Cecily was treated was the result of her friendship with Queen Marguerite – though the chronicles also report that ‘she was kept full straight with many a rebuke’ from her sister – and by January 1460 she was free to move southwards again. All the same, Cecily’s fortunes seemed to be at a low ebb.

No wonder the German artist Albrecht Dürer drew Fortune so frequently and in so many different guises, blind and pregnant, wounded or weaponed: the image reflected the arbitrary and ever-changing nature of these times. The poet John Skelton would lament Edward IV himself as Fortune’s fool:

She took me by the hand and led me a dance,

And with her sugared lips on me she smiled,

But, what from her dissembled countenance,

I could not beware till I was beguiled …

At this moment, the future prominence of Cecily’s son had never looked more unlikely.

SIX

Mightiness Meets Misery

then, in a moment, see

How soon this mightiness meets misery

Henry VIII, Prologue

Even by the standards of these tumultuous years, the ups and downs of these few months were extraordinary. In the summer of 1460, Cecily’s Yorkist menfolk were back with a fresh army. At Northampton, in July, they again met the forces of the king and queen, and this time the Yorkists were able to seize the person of Henry VI and bring him back to London as their puppet or prisoner, all the while proclaiming their loyalty.

The London chronicler Gregory described Marguerite’s flight. ‘The queen, hearing this, voided unto Wales but … a servant of her own … spoiled her and robbed her, and put her so in doubt of her life and son’s life also.’ But they managed to escape. ‘And then she come to the castle of Harlech in Wales [the home of Jasper Tudor], and she had many great gifts and [was] greatly comforted, for she had need thereof …’ She had only four companions, the chronicler reports in horror (a great lady’s household might be a hundred and fifty) and she was often forced to ride pillion behind a fourteen-year-old boy.

Marguerite was not the only woman whose fortunes had changed overnight. Everything was changing, once again, for Cecily, too. In this latest battle, her brother-in-law the Duke of Buckingham had been among the casualties. While Warwick returned to Calais in triumph to fetch his family home, Cecily, with her younger children, moved to London, to await word from her husband. As Queen Marguerite fled westwards, York sent for Cecily (travelling in a chair of blue velvet,
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‘and four pair coursers therein’) to come and meet him in Hereford, to share his triumphal progress, heralded by trumpeters and displaying the royal arms, back towards the city.

It surely says something about their relationship that he wanted her by his side, riding in victory through the green summer countryside. But in fact the very flamboyance of their entry may have worked against them. Citizens and nobles alike were pleased enough to welcome York: a steady hand to keep anarchy at bay. But when it looked as though he would claim the throne itself, it was clear they were no more ready to accept this usurpation than they had been Marguerite’s proxy sovereignty. One monastic chronicler, the Abbot of St Albans John Whethamsted, left a long and vivid description of the misstep into which York’s ‘exaltation of mood’ led him; right down to the distribution of the major players around Westminster palace. York strode to the parliamentary chamber and laid his hand upon the throne as if to claim it. He waited for the applause which, however, failed to come and then (the king being ‘in the queen’s apartments’) moved to the principal chamber of the palace, smashing the locks to gain his entry.

People of all ‘estates and ranks, age, sex, order and condition’ had begun to murmur against York’s presumption. By the end of October 1460 a deal had been hammered out by which Henry would keep the throne for his lifetime but would not be succeeded by his son. Instead, York and York’s sons would be his heirs, an idea presumably made more plausible by that long whispering campaign suggesting Marguerite’s infidelity. Such a prospect, with its huge advancement for her children, must have been welcome to Cecily. But of course Marguerite, whose own young son had been disinherited, was never going to accept it quietly.

Towards the end of the year she took ship northwards from Wales. Marguerite’s plan was to appeal for help from the Scots – where, ironically, another woman, Mary of Guelders, was commencing her rule as regent on behalf of her eight-year-old son James, her husband having recently been killed by an exploding cannon while besieging Yorkist sympathisers at Roxburgh. Mary sent an envoy to escort Marguerite and her young son to Dumfries and Lincluden Abbey where they were royally entertained and herself came down to meet them. The two queens spent twelve days together at the abbey; and Mary promised military aid, offering the hospitality of the Scottish royal palaces while it was assembled. Moving into England with a foreign army would do little to increase her popularity, but Marguerite was in no mood to worry.

With Henry’s captivity she had now become the undisputed leader of what was beginning to look like a genuine opposition party: stripped of much she had once enjoyed, but liberated for the first time to act openly on her own initiative. The Yorkist lords, according to
Gregory’s Chronicle
, tried to lure Marguerite back to London with faked messages from her husband, ‘for they knew well that all the workings that were done grew by her, for she was more wittier than the king …’.

As the Duke of York moved north to meet the impending Lancastrian threat, Marguerite’s name was being invoked by friends and enemies alike – even before she was ready to leave Scotland. York, holed up in his own Sandal Castle, was advised (says the Tudor writer Hall, whose grandfather had been the adviser concerned) not to sally out, but answered it would be dishonour to do so ‘for dread of a scolding woman, whose only weapons are her tongue and her nails’. The Lancastrian herald, trying to provoke York into taking a dangerous offensive, sneered that he should allow himself ‘to be tamely braved by a woman’.

York should have heeded all the warnings. For now, once again, it would be Cecily’s turn to drink a bitter cup. No wonder she, like Margaret Beaufort, would remember the image of Fortune’s wheel; and would, perhaps ironically, bequeath a bed decorated with that image to the Tudor dynasty. In the words of an anonymous poem:

I have see fall to men of high nobleness –

First wealth, and then again distress,

Now up, now down, as fortune turneth her wheel

On December 30 the royal forces (under the command of the third Duke of Somerset, Margaret Beaufort’s cousin, who shared his father’s and uncle’s strong Lancastrian loyalty) met the Yorkists at the battle of Wakefield. The Yorkists were defeated; and casualties of the rout included York himself, pulled from his horse in the thick of the fray and his seventeen-year-old son Edmund, with whose death Shakespeare would make such play. Salisbury (whose son had also died) was killed the next day. Their heads were set on spikes on the gates of York city, the duke’s capped with a paper crown. Tudor chroniclers like Hall and Holinshed,
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followed by Shakespeare, had the heads presented to a savagely vengeful Marguerite. But in fact Marguerite left Scotland only after news of the victory, travelling southwards in an outfit of black and silver lent to her by the Scottish queen Mary.

Cecily had lost a husband, a son, a brother, and a nephew. The news must have reached her and her three youngest children in London, probably at Baynard’s Castle, with the taste of the Christmas feasts still in their mouths. A great house like Baynard’s Castle with its gardens and terraces, its great hall and its courtyards capable of holding the four hundred armed men the Duke had once brought with him from Ireland, must have seemed a place of refuge in a treacherously shifting world. But the Duke of York’s death brought to an end a long and in many ways happy union. It had also narrowly deprived Cecily of her chance of being queen, and she would not forget it easily.

Marguerite’s party were once more in the ascendant. As the queen came south with her forces, some time in January or early February 1461, she sent letters – one on her own behalf, and one in the name of her young son – to the authorities of London, demanding the city’s loyalty. The one from the seven-year-old prince presents him as the active avenger, heading his army, and mentions his mother only as a potential victim. Marguerite’s own letter is obliged to suggest that she is acting in tandem with her young son; but it does present her forcefully: ‘Praying you, on our most hearty and desirous wise, that [above] all earthly things you will diligently intend [attend] to the surety of my lord’s royal person in the mean time; so that through malice of his said enemy he be no more troubled, vexed, or jeoparded. And, by so doing, we shall be unto you such a lady as of reason you shall largely be content.’