Daughter of York (87 page)

Or fly to thee fast on the tide’s next turn?”

“Fly, my love, fly,” Margaret whispered into the wind. “To Burgundy!”

Author’s Note

The vast domain held by the four Valois dukes of Burgundy for little more than a century collapsed within two decades of Charles the Bold’s death at Nancy. Joseph Calmette in
The Golden Age of Burgundy
states, “The last of the great dukes, because of his impulsive and impetuous nature, brought the whole structure crashing down… . The powerful State of Burgundy, which had appeared like a blinding flash across the horizon of history, suddenly, and for ever, vanished, on the fatal day of the Nancy disaster.” If my readers have a hard time understanding the intricacies of Burgundian politics, which I have tried to whittle down and make palatable here for historical fiction aficionados, then I hope they may appreciate the research and editing that went into that whittling down.

Margaret of York’s early life in London is not well documented other than a few mentions of her appearances in public places such as at Elizabeth Woodville’s coronation and her declaration of willingness to marry Charles the Bold at the Great Council at Kingston. Twenty-two was considered old for a royal princess to make a marriage alliance, but her unwed status was not for lack of suitors. Edward was otherwise occupied with
keeping himself safe on the throne during those first years of his reign, and so Margaret’s marriage necessarily took a back seat. It is odd, too, that her father, Richard of York, never betrothed her as a child to another noble family, which was common in medieval times. It seems the Yorks also allowed all their sons to reach late teens without matching them with heiresses. And all three sons chose their own wives for one reason or another.

Although I have walked over almost all the ground covered in the book, I had to resort to a few virtual walks through villages in northern France. Sadly, the palaces of Greenwich, Ten Waele, Coudenberg, Binche and Prinsenhof no longer exist in their medieval splendor, but I was able to step inside part of Margaret’s palace at Mechelen (Malines), which is now a theater, thanks to the timely exit of the artistic director from the closed building. She kindly showed me into what must have been the great hall, and I felt Margaret’s presence for the first time in my tour. Also seeing the house in Damme where Margaret and Charles were married was especially poignant. Likewise, imagining Margaret’s visit to Louis de Gruuthuse’s magnificent house—which is intact and now a museum not to be missed in Bruges—was a highlight of my trip.

I was lucky that nowhere are the names of Margaret’s ladies recorded, except for Marie de Charny, Duke Philip’s bastard daughter. We know who traveled with Margaret to her wedding, but we do not know who stayed with her in Burgundy, if anyone. As the only girl left in the York household from an early age, Margaret must have lacked for sisterly companions. I chose to invent Fortunata because I needed Margaret to have someone to confide in, someone with intelligence and humor who would not have been chronicled and who could bridge the great divide for Margaret between her life in England and on the Continent.

William Caxton continued to translate and print books at the Red Pale, aided by his foreman Wynkyn de Worde, until his death in 1491. It is thought that close to a hundred books were printed by him. We know he had a daughter, Elizabeth, who survived him, because her ex-husband, Gerard Croppe, filed claims against William’s will in 1496. We do not know, however, who his wife was.

My other invention is the love story of Margaret and Anthony Woodville. It is not beyond the realm of possibility, given that Anthony was the queen’s brother and at court constantly. He shared Margaret’s love
of books, and they must have had much to talk about. I am not the only person who thinks an
affaire de coeur
is plausible. Margaret’s most recent biographer, Christine Weightman, and another Margaret expert, Ann Wroe (
Perkin, The Perfect Prince
), have told me they believe it was a possibility. Both Margaret and Anthony were pious people, Margaret even more so in her old age (she lived to age fifty-nine), when she was resigned to widowhood and did not seek to remarry. History tell us that she did not marry Anthony, though I leave the reader anticipating the marriage at the end of the book. In fact, a month after Margaret left England, Anthony married the heiress Maria Fitzlewes, hence my brief mention of the young woman during Margaret’s last few days at Greenwich in 1480. We do not know if Maria was Anthony’s personal choice or one thrust upon him.

History also tells us that Margaret did indeed stay with Anthony at his estate in Kent (The Mote) before returning to Burgundy at the end of that summer. It was this little piece of information that set me on the path of a possible love between them. I hope the reader will forgive me for allowing Margaret to end her precious visit to England on a positive note! As for Anthony, it has been my experience that men have a hard time facing conflict in a romantic relationship, and I imagined he was no different. I like to think he had her best interests at heart by letting her go back to Burgundy full of happy anticipation. Perhaps this deception and guilt was the reason he was wearing a hair shirt under his doublet when he was undressed for his execution three years later. As a novelist, I can only imagine! Here is the poem he wrote the night before his death at Pontefract on orders of King Richard III:

“My life was lent,

To what intent?

It is near spent,

So welcome Fate!

Though I ne’er thought

Low to be brought,

Since she so planned

I take her hand.”

I have taken a few dramatic liberties in the book, which I hope the reader will forgive. I do not like to play with facts, believing strongly that
in the best historical fiction, history is the skeleton and the author merely puts flesh on the bones. We do not have an exact date for Caxton’s return to England, but we know he had set up his shop under the sign of the Red Pale by 1477. We know from the above-mentioned poem and from his love of poetry that Anthony Woodville tried his hand at the art; certainly his prose can be read in several books that Caxton printed. None of his poetry except the above has survived, and so with the help of some fifteenth-and sixteenth-century anonymous verse, I have put the pen in Anthony’s hand. The last poem in the book, however, is my own modest attempt at the form.

Margaret did have a “secret boy” at Binche from 1478 to 1485 (the time of Bosworth), when he and his tutor-chaplain disappeared from Margaret’s accounts. Fellow author and historian Ann Wroe has written extensively about the boy in the Richard III Society’s quarterly,
The Ricardian
, and in her biography of Perkin Warbeck (or was he Duke Richard, who disappeared from the Tower in 1483 with his brother, Edward?). Even though we know Jehan existed, we do not know Margaret’s reason for taking him in or why he disappeared from her accounts.

Edward IV’s death in April 1483 set off a series of events that culminated in Richard of Gloucester becoming king, setting aside Edward’s two sons, who have become known through history as the princes in the Tower. A few weeks following King Edward’s death, Bishop Stillington came forward to admit he had been witness to a “pre-contract” of marriage, which was deemed binding in those days, between Edward and Eleanor Butler before Edward married Elizabeth Woodville. This has never been proven, but the story has persisted, and it proved catastrophic for the house of York in the mid-1480s. I chose to include this story in case a reader might want to discover the consequences as told in my first novel,
A Rose for the Crown.

As a novelist, I found that the hardest feature of my storytelling came in the guise of an exact itinerary of Charles the Bold and Margaret’s and Mary’s whereabouts throughout Charles’s ten-year rule. When I wanted Margaret in Bruges, she was in Ghent, and when I wanted her to meet Anthony secretly, I had to do it on one of her many travels to evade the eagle eye of the court chronicler! Herman Vander Linden was very assiduous in his archive-combing back in the 1930s, but he was a thorn in my
side as a fiction writer! However, I have to confess his publication proved invaluable on most occasions.

The five years of Margaret’s life after her return to Burgundy were so full of tragedy that I hesitate to burden the reader. For those of you who care, she suffered through her dear Mary’s tragic death from a riding accident in 1482, Anthony’s beheading by Richard III in 1483 and the fall of her beloved house of York at Bosworth in 1485. Maximilian of Austria was never accepted by the Flemish people, even spending seven months as a prisoner in Bruges a few years after Mary’s death. He was a man of ambitious ideas, proud and brave, but he was unstable and egotistical, leading Margaret’s and Mary’s faithful councilors, Ravenstein and Gruuthuse, for example, to abandon him.

Margaret did, however, soldier on to bring up her step-grandchildren, following Mary’s death, and see Philip the Handsome become duke of a much smaller state of Burgundy and Margaretha regent of the Netherlands. Philip married Joan of Spain and in 1506 became Philip I of that country, thus founding the Spanish Habsburg family. His son became the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. All had Margaret to thank for her love and influence.

Cecily of York died in 1495 at the age of eighty and was outlived by only two of her twelve children (some Web sources say thirteen): Elizabeth, duchess of Suffolk, who died in early 1503, and Margaret, duchess of Burgundy, who died November 24, 1503.

Anne Easter Smith
Newburyport, Mass.

Glossary

all-night
—snack before bedtime served to the king by one of his lords.
arras
—tapestry or wall hanging.

attaint
—imputation of dishonor or treason. Estates of attainted lord often forfeited to the crown.

avise
—to look closely, study.

bailey
—outer wall of a castle.

bavière
—part of armor that protected lower face.

basse danse
—slow, stately dance.

buckler
—small round shield.

burthen
—refrain or chorus of a song.

butt
—barrel for wine.

butts
—archery targets.

caravel
—medieval sailing ship.

catafalque
—funeral chariot.

caul
—mesh hair covering, often jeweled or decorated, often encasing braids wound on either side of the head.

chaperon
—elaborate soft hat, often with a liripipe attached.

chevalier
—knight of honor.

churching
—first communion given to a woman following the period of seclusion after giving birth.

clarion
—a horn.

coif
—scarf tied around the head.

caparisoned
—ornamental cloth covering over a horse’s armor.

conduit
—drinking fountain in a town or city with piped-in water.

coney
—rabbit or rabbit fur.

cote
—(or
cotehardie
) long gown worn by men and women.

coustilier
—cavalry soldier.

crakows
—fashionable long-pointed shoes, said to have originated in Krakow, Poland.

crenellation
—indentation at top of battlement wall.

ewerer
—water-pourer and holder of hand-washing bowls at table.