Blood Sisters (10 page)

As her army swept ever southwards, her troops pillaged the land
³⁷
and, unable to pay them, she did nothing to prevent it. Their actions did much to sour her subsequent reputation, besides providing fuel for Yorkist propaganda that implicitly linked this catastrophic ‘misrule’ with the parallel reversal of right order represented by a woman’s leadership.

After the second battle of St Albans, on 17 February 1461, the reports were full of mentions of the queen or the queen’s party. One source, the Milanese ambassador in France, Prospero di Camulio, seems even to suggest that this time she was in the thick of the fray: ‘The earl of Warwick decided to quit the field, and … pushed through right into Albano [St Albans], where the queen was with 30,000 men.’ The chronicler Gregory wrote that in the midst of the battle ‘King Harry went to his queen and forsook all his lords, and trusted better to her party than to his own… .’ One anecdotal report of a speech Marguerite once made to her men is as heroic in its way as Elizabeth I’s at Tilbury: ‘I have often broken [the English] battle line. I have mowed down ranks far more stubborn than theirs are now. You who once followed a peasant girl [Joan of Arc] now follow a queen … I will either conquer or be conquered with you.’

Marguerite had by now experienced far more warfare than most ladies of her time. She had known the tension beforehand, mounting to fever pitch; the fear that each step of your horse’s hoof could bring it down on the sharp point of a hidden caltrop, before men rushed out from ambush to claim you as their prey; and the roads afterwards, crammed with the bodies of horses and with bleeding, dying men who lacked even the strength to crawl away.

When the engagement at St Albans was over King Henry, brought there by Warwick under guard, was found seated under an oak tree, and Marguerite was reunited with her husband. As the couple halted outside London the city officials requested that a carefully chosen delegation of ladies should act in the traditional way as go-betweens, interceding with Marguerite ‘for to be benevolent and owe goodwill to the city’. The ladies were Ismanie, Lady Scales
³⁸
who had been among those escorting Marguerite from France and who had remained in her household; the widowed Duchess of Buckingham, Cecily of York’s sister, whose husband had been killed the previous summer fighting in the Lancastrian cause; and Jacquetta, dowager Duchess of Bedford, another member of the party that had escorted Marguerite to England. Of the princely house of Luxembourg, and married in her youth to Henry VI’s uncle John, Jacquetta had been widowed in 1435 at the age of nineteen; ‘minding also to marry rather for pleasure than for honour, without counsel of her friends’ she had promptly taken as her second husband ‘a lusty knight, Sir Richard Woodville’. Jacquetta had remained close to the queen; and indeed her eldest daughter Elizabeth
³⁹
may have been one of Marguerite’s ladies. Now not only was Jacquetta’s own husband with the queen’s force, but so too had been her daughter’s husband John Grey, father of her two young sons. Grey had recently died at the second battle of St Albans; and it was Elizabeth Woodville’s widowhood that would soon propel her into national history.

A letter reported that the delegation had returned to London on 20 February with news that ‘the king and queen had no mind to pillage the chief city and chamber of their realm, and so they promised; but at the same time they did not mean that they would not punish the evildoers’. The message was sufficiently ambiguous that there was still panic in the streets, and the ladies were sent out again two days later to request the Lancastrian leaders to enter the city without the main body of their army. The queen conceded; ironically, her decision to send only a small symbolic force into London, and her subsequent withdrawal to Dunstable, would prove to be arguably the biggest mistake of her life. The wheel was about to turn yet again.

The huge overturns of fortune did not come heralded in any way. In the weeks after the battle of Wakefield, Cecily Neville had been so afraid that she had sent her two younger sons, George and Richard, abroad to the safety of Burgundy. Yet almost as she did so her eldest son Edward and the Earl of Warwick, with their armies, were preparing to approach London from the west. On 27 February they were welcomed into the city, where Edward went to his mother’s house of Baynard’s Castle.

This time there was no talk of loyalty to King Henry – or of wishing only to rid him of his evil counsellors. On 1 March the Bishop of Exeter, Warwick’s brother, asked the eager Londoners whether they felt that Henry deserved to rule, ‘whereunto’, as the
Great Chronicle of London
reported, ‘the people cried hugely and said Nay. And after it was asked of them whether they would have the Earl of March [Edward] for their king and they cried with one voice, Yea, Yea.’

Cecily Neville’s eldest son, the ‘fair white rose’ of York, was still only eighteen but when, three days later, he was acclaimed and enthroned, his huge stature and glowing golden looks made him seem every inch the king. The youthful Edward with his royal bloodline was not only the favourite candidate backed by Warwick and the Neville party, but had recently proved his mettle with his victory at Mortimer’s Cross.

But the Yorkists had not yet completely won. London was not England. On 13 March, with Warwick already engaged recruiting men in the Midlands, King Edward marched his army north where Henry and Marguerite still commanded the loyalty of a majority of the nobility. Prospero di Camulio erroneously heard that Marguerite had given her husband poison, after persuading him to abdicate in favour of their son: ‘However these are rumours in which I do not repose much confidence.’ And very soon, after the dreadful battle of Towton, di Camulio was writing less cautiously.

Fought outside York in wintry weather, on an icy Palm Sunday, Towton is still probably the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. No detailed description survives, and the numbers of those involved, as estimated by contemporary reporters and later historians, vary wildly. But what is agreed is that this was a ten-hour endurance test in which men slogged each other to exhaustion; one in which King Edward told his men to give no quarter; and the opposing Lancastrians, with the wind against them, suffered snow and arrows blowing together into their faces.

Before the battle even began both sides were already tired and frozen after a bitter night spent in the biting wind. None the less, the fighting went on until ten o’clock at night, long after it was dark. By dusk the Lancastrian forces had been driven backwards to a deep gully of the river Cock, and many who were not hacked down were drowned as they tried to cross. It was, says the
Great Chronicle of London
, ‘a sore and long and unkindly fight – for there was the son against the father, the brother against brother’. Crowland talks of more than thirty-eight thousand dead; and though that is probably an exaggeration, ‘many a lady’, said
Gregory’s Chronicle
, lost her beloved that day.

For others, of course, the news was good. Cecily had word of the victory early, on 3 April, as William Paston wrote: ‘Please you to know such tidings as my Lady of York hath by a letter of credence under the sign manual of our sovereign lord king Edward, which letter came unto our said lady this same day … at xi clock and was seen and read by me.’ The Bishop of Elphin, as he subsequently told the Papal Legate, sets the glad tidings later:
⁴⁰
‘On Easter Monday, at the vesper hour [sunset], I was in the house of the Duchess of York. Immediately after vespers the Lord Treasurer came to her with an authentic letter … On hearing the news the Duchess [returned] to the chapel with two chaplains and myself and there we said “Te Deum” after which I told her that the time was come for writing to your Lordship, of which she approved… .’

Now it was Marguerite, her husband and her son who were to flee, leaving York, where they waited for news, with only what they could carry. As Prospero di Camulio wrote: ‘Any one who reflects at all upon the wretchedness of that queen and the ruins of those killed and considers the ferocity of the country, and the state of mind of the victors, should indeed, it seems to me, pray to God for the dead and not less for the living.’

PART TWO

1461–1471

SEVEN

To Love a King

Lady Grey:
Why stops my lord? Shall I not hear my task?

Edward:
An easy task: ’tis but to love a king.

Henry VI Part 3
, 3.2

A new regime had come in, a new ruling house held the throne, and everything had changed. But none of the protagonists could fail to be aware that Fortune’s wheel could just as easily spin in the opposite direction.

The fortunes of Marguerite of Anjou had for the present turned dramatically for the worse. After the battle of Towton she, her husband and son had fled back to Scotland where they would remain for the next year. The refugees were forced to promise the perpetually contested border town of Berwick to the Scots in return, while any further attempt to recruit French aid was temporarily thwarted by the death that summer of the French king Charles VII. His successor Louis would have to be wooed afresh. Attainted in the first parliament of November 1461 for transgressions and offences ‘against her faith and Liegance’ to King Edward, Marguerite was being destroyed as only a woman could be. In the words of a contemporary ballad:

Moreover it is a right great perversion,

A woman of a land to be a regent –

Queen Margaret I mean, that ever hath meant

To govern all England with might and power

And to destroy the right line was her intent.

Another ballad, composed a couple of years later, had Henry VI lamenting he had married a wife ‘That was the cause of all my moan’. The absent Marguerite was now everyone’s choice of villain. When the Tudor chronicler Polydore Vergil wrote later that ‘By mean of a woman, sprang up a new mischief that set all out of order’, he was casting her as another Eve. Even Edward, for whom Henry should surely have been the greatest enemy, wrote of his having been moved ‘by the malicious and subtle suggestion and enticing of the said malicious woman Margaret his wife’.

Elizabeth Woodville had certainly suffered: not just the loss of her husband John Grey, but the potential destruction of her whole family. She could no longer count on the security of a home on one of the Grey family’s Midland estates. Not only would she have to fight her mother-in-law for her dower rights, but as leading Lancastrians the Woodvilles might well have found themselves ruined when Henry and Marguerite fell.

Margaret Beaufort too had suffered, though to a lesser degree. The armed clashes that brought the Yorkists into power had killed her father-in-law the Duke of Buckingham at Northampton in 1460, and brought the position of his family into question. They had also scattered her family of birth. Her cousin Henry, the latest Duke of Somerset (son to Marguerite’s ally), had to flee abroad after Towton with his younger brothers, as did Jasper Tudor. In the autumn of 1461 Jasper followed Queen Marguerite into her Scottish exile and would spend almost a decade, there and in France, trying to rally the Lancastrian cause.

Margaret’s husband, Henry Stafford, had fought for the Lancastrians at Towton; he, however, was pardoned by a King Edward determined to heal breaches where possible. The couple were able to establish themselves in the castle of Bourne in the Fen country, part of Margaret’s inheritance from her grandmother. The wardship of the four-year-old Henry Tudor was another matter. He was no threat to Edward (or rather, with Henry VI and his son both living, he was not the greatest threat), but he and his lands did present an opportunity.

The boy’s lands were transferred to the Duke of Clarence and his wardship handed to the devoted Yorkist Sir William Herbert, the man who had once seized Carmarthen Castle and taken Edmund Tudor into custody. For several years this arrangement seemed a comparatively happy one: Henry, visited by Margaret and her husband, was raised with every advantage as one of Herbert’s own family – which, with several young daughters to marry off, they may have planned he would one day become.

As for Cecily Neville, it must have been hard for her to work out where Fortune’s wheel had left her. The loss of her husband and her second son, a shattering personal grief, was only weeks behind her; but now another son, her eldest, sat on the throne, opening up a world of possibilities. As Edward set out north again, it was his mother whom he commended to the burghers of London as his representative. The Bishop of Elphin concluded his letter about Cecily’s reception of the battlefield news by urging the Papal Legate: ‘As soon as you can, write to the King, the Chancellor, and other Lords, as I see they wish it; also to the Duchess, who is partial to you, and [holds] the king at her pleasure.’ In the early days of Edward IV’s reign, perhaps the bishop was not the only one to consider that Cecily could rule her son as she wished. Edward granted to her the lands held by his father
¹
and further subsidised her ever-lavish expenditure. She regarded herself as queen dowager, and played the part. Edward must, after all, have been aware that he had come to the throne by the efforts of her relations, and he was young enough for everyone – perhaps even including his mother – to underestimate his capabilities.
^fn3