Blood Sisters (13 page)

Marguerite was finally forced to retreat to her father’s estate at St Michel-sur-Bar, living on an inadequate pension from him and paying visits to her European relatives. Letters from her officers detail the continued extreme shortage of ready money – hardly enough coins to pay the messenger – ‘but yet the Queen sustaineth us in meat and drink, so as we be not in extreme necessity’. Early in 1465 she tried again to get help from King Louis, but, realising she was in no position to make demands, he merely mocked her plea. In July that year the fugitive Henry VI was finally captured and, after a humiliating journey south with his legs tied to his horse’s stirrups and a straw hat on his head, placed in comparatively lenient imprisonment in the Tower. Here he was at liberty to receive visitors, even though Lancastrian chroniclers complained that he was not kept clean as a king should be. He would remain in captivity for the next five years while – for an England settling into Edward’s rule and Elizabeth’s queenship – Marguerite on the continent was a threat that refused to go away.

Marguerite’s own mood must have been made the more desperate by news that things were going well in England, especially when she learned that it was the daughter of her old friend Jacquetta who had changed sides and supplanted her, with Jacquetta’s active connivance. This year, 1465, Elizabeth was asked to become patroness of the college (now Queens’) that Marguerite herself had founded in Cambridge ‘to laud and honour of sex feminine’. Patronage was an established function of queenship; royally born or not, Elizabeth Woodville was settling into her new role.

Hard on the heels of her coronation came news that Queen Elizabeth was pregnant, and in February 1466 Elizabeth of York was born at Westminster. The physician – or astrologer – Master Dominic had been convinced this would be a prince, says the chronicler Fabian; when the child turned out to be a girl the Archbishop of York was substituted for that of Canterbury at the christening. But there was no other diminution of ceremony. A visitor from Bohemia, one Gabriel Tetzel, who had arrived in the retinue of the lord of Rozmital, left an account of the queen’s magnificent churching forty days after the birth.

Tetzel was already convinced that this was ‘the most splendid court that one can find in all Christendom’ when he saw the procession that headed to Westminster Abbey – forty-two singers, twenty-four heralds, sixty lords before the queen and sixty-two ladies after her. The banquet that followed – or rather banquets, since the king and queen kept their separate state – was a striking display of court etiquette. Some commentators have taken it as an example of the upstart Elizabeth Woodville’s personal grandiosity, but in fact it may have been no more than the reverence the English were expected to pay to majesty.

Leo von Rozmital and his party were carefully seated (King Edward would have wanted reports of the occasion to spread abroad) in an alcove of ‘a particularly splendid and decorated hall’ where Elizabeth sat alone at table on a costly golden chair. ‘The queen’s mother and the king’s sister had to stand below,’ said Tetzel. ‘And if the queen talked with her mother or with the king’s sister, they had to kneel before the queen until she drank water. Not until the first dish was set before her were they allowed to sit down.’ Her ladies had, he says, to kneel as long as she was eating – no light undertaking, since the meal lasted three silent hours.

Edward’s sister Elizabeth was on the new queen’s right, his youngest sister, Margaret, on her left. No mention was made of the king’s eldest sister, Anne – and his mother, Cecily, presumably chose to absent herself. After the banquet came the dancing: Margaret took the floor with two dukes ‘in stately dances, and made impressive courtesies to the queen such as I have never seen elsewhere; nor have I witnessed such outstandingly beautiful maidens.’ Edward’s charm offensive, designed to increase his reputation around the European courts, had clearly worked spectacularly well and his queen was proving an adept, new to the task though she might be.

The only surviving accounts for Elizabeth Woodville date from 1466–7, and, though it is tempting to concentrate on the colourful details (
£
14 for sable furs,
£
18 7
s
6
d
for medicines), they make it clear that to be a queen was not only to be a diplomatic pawn, a breeding machine (she gave birth to a second daughter, Mary, in August 1467) and a decorative accessory. A major element in the role was to be the head of an important household, the mistress of large and widely dispersed estates, and an employer of labourers, craftsmen and professionals in many different capacities.

Elizabeth’s income during this period was
£
4541 (as opposed to the extravagant Marguerite of Anjou’s
£
7563, fourteen years before) but she ended the year in profit, unlike Marguerite, employing seven maids to Marguerite’s ten and paying more cautiously. Marguerite had paid one of her principal ladies-in-waiting, Barbalina, 40 marks a year; Elizabeth paid her principal ladies 20. Her husband did not charge her, as Marguerite’s had done, for the time her household spent living with his; some recompense for the fact that he could not afford to grant her dower lands on the scale her predecessor had enjoyed. Elizabeth was sharp when she needed to be in the pursuance of her rights: an undated letter to Sir William Stonor chastises him for the fact that he had taken it upon himself ‘to make masteries within our forest and chace of Barnwood and Exhill, and there, in contempt of us, uncourteously to hunt and slay our deer within the same, to our great marvel and displeasure’. In 1468 instructions of the king’s concerning the Pastons’ affairs were echoed by letters from the queen to the duchesses of Norfolk and Suffolk; she had already written more directly to the Earl of Oxford on the same point. But there remains the question of when and how the use of her influence might be seen as inappropriate by her contemporaries.

A queen was allowed and even expected to exercise influence
⁸
– to intercede on behalf of those to whom she owed protection. It was part of the symbiotic relationship the phrase ‘good ladyship’ implied. But Elizabeth’s advancement of her family over the years did leave both herself and her husband vulnerable to attack. Certainly these years saw a cementing of Woodville alliances in a way that seemed threatening to other members of the nobility – not least to Edward’s brother Clarence. Five Woodville brothers and five sisters married into the nobility, the men being given influential posts; to say nothing, as they grew, of those two sons by her first marriage. The Milanese envoy’s later report that since her coronation Elizabeth ‘had always exerted herself to aggrandise her relations … they had the entire government of the realm’ might have been based on her enemy Warwick’s propaganda; but it did reflect the popular perception. When Warwick, turning later against Edward, proclaimed him guilty of turning to a life of ‘pastime, pleasure, and dalliance’ and choosing unsuitable companions, ‘men descended of low blood and base degree’, he was using the Woodville connection as a stick with which to beat the king, as well as bringing up the concept of scapegoats – ‘evil counsellors’ – which the would-be kingmakers of these years had so frequently invoked.

Up to a point Elizabeth had been doing what anyone would have done, and in many ways Warwick and his associates had been just the same. There is a case for suggesting that Edward had consciously elevated the Woodvilles as an alternative power base to Warwick’s: one dependent on him, rather than on his mentor, and one which he could control. Elizabeth’s family, after all, had now become his. The Woodville rise had been, however, both flamboyant and somewhat roughshod – in 1466 Elizabeth’s sister Katherine, for example, was married to the youthful Duke of Buckingham, who, in later years, was said to have bitterly resented a bride he felt was beneath him. One of her brothers, John, no more than twenty, had made a marriage that attracted widespread disapproval with the Duchess of Norfolk, ‘a slip of a girl about eighty years old’.
^fn4
The queen’s father had been given the title Earl Rivers. One day the king’s fool promenaded through the court, dressed as for passing through water. When the king asked why, he punned that he had had difficulty passing through many parts of the realm because the ‘Rivers’ were running so high.

There was trouble in the late 1460s because of the prominent part the Woodvilles were said to have played in arranging the marriage between Charles, Duke of Burgundy and Edward’s sister Margaret, who since the queen’s arrival had been living at court as one of her ladies. Indeed, Crowland says that the enmity between the Woodvilles and Warwick really began when he heard that they (‘in conformity with the King’s wishes’) were promoting the Burgundian match. That comment is probably key: the Woodvilles were only carrying out Edward’s wishes. None the less the pageantry associated with such a marriage was a field in which the young Woodvilles, with their continental inheritance from their mother Jacquetta, could shine.

At a legendary tournament at Smithfield in London in June 1467 Elizabeth Woodville’s brother Anthony – his horses variously decked out in white cloth of gold; in damasks of purple, green and tawny; in blue and crimson velvet; and in crimson cloth trimmed with sables – fought the ‘Bastard of Burgundy’, the half-brother of Duke Charles, in a ritual battle carefully brought to an end by the king before the knights could do real damage to each other or to his diplomacy. Anthony Woodville, the ultimate early Renaissance man, told a chivalric tale of how the queen’s ladies pounced on him (while he was speaking to his sister on his knees, ‘my bonnet off my head, according to my duty’) and tied a jewelled band to his leg, with a letter bidding him to attend the tournament – ‘the adventure of the flower of Souvenance’, or remembrance. The emphasis on courtly parade in the reign of Edward IV deliberately evoked his inheritance from Edward III, and thus provided a king who had seized his crown with an aura of legitimacy. So far did the fifteenth-century chivalric ‘revival’ go that knights were actually known to set up their shield at crossroads and wait for challengers, in the approved Arthurian style. But the parade was useful also for Edward’s queen. In a society that was arguably becoming more patriarchal, the chivalric spectacle provided a platform for women.

Underneath all this pageantry lurked something darker. Louis of France – who had no wish for his two enemies, England and Burgundy, to form any alliance – had been spreading malicious rumours about Princess Margaret’s chastity. It was the Milanese ambassador at the French court who passed on stories that she was ‘somewhat attached to love affairs and even, in the opinion of many, has had a son’. There is no reason to believe there was any truth in the tale, but Edward’s own love affairs and colourful marriage must have lent it some air of plausibility. None the less, the tournament held when Margaret arrived in the Burgundian city of Bruges, known as the Tournament of the Golden Tree, was no less splendid than the one at Smithfield and may have been more genuinely perilous. Burgundy paid full lip service to the courtly ideal, and Charles truly loved warfare. In the end, Margaret had to wave her handkerchief in the time-honoured way to ask him to call off the bloodshed. She was, so John Paston reported, ‘received as worshipfully as all the world could devise’.

Elizabeth Woodville’s brothers were prominent among the escort who accompanied Margaret across the Channel. In Bruges, Edward Woodville was declared prince of the tourney. Anthony was Margaret’s chief presenter at the Burgundian court. The English government had granted expenses to send Margaret off generously equipped with
£
1000 worth of silks and £160 worth of gold, silver and gilt dishes. She would have needed such finery for the nine-day celebrations, at which the feasting guests delighted in gilded swans and harts carrying panniers of oranges, and unicorns bearing baskets of sweetmeats; monkeys threw trinkets to the company, and a court dwarf on a gilded lion competed for attention with a wild man on a dromedary. John Paston wrote: ‘As for the Duke’s court as of ladies and gentlewomen, knights, squires and gentlemen I heard never of none like to it save King Arthur’s court … for such gear and gold and pearl and stones they of the Duke’s court, neither gentlemen or gentlewomen, they want none.’ In Aachen, a crown still survives inscribed ‘MARGARIT[A] DE [Y]O[R]K’. Made of silver-gilt, enamel, precious stones and pearls, ornamented with white roses, it is most likely to have been made either to celebrate Margaret’s wedding, or else as a votive offering to be worn by the statue of the Virgin that still carries it on major feast days.

There is no reason to doubt that, on the other side of the royal family, Cecily too approved her daughter’s marriage. Charles was, in Edward’s words, ‘one of the mightiest Princes in the world that beareth no crown’, and queens (the position to which Cecily aspired) expected to send their daughters away. All the same, it is impossible to separate the acknowledgement of the Yorkist dynasty that Margaret’s marriage represented from the success of the Woodville family; while the prominence of the unpopular Woodvilles in its turn helped to ensure that the Lancastrian threat never went away.

These were, after all, still paranoid years. Messengers from abroad, bringing instructions from Marguerite,
⁹
were being captured. Part of the money for the dowry Margaret took to Burgundy had been raised by a loan from London merchants but one of them, Sir Thomas Cook, was arrested before she left the country. One Cornelius, a shoemaker serving one of Marguerite of Anjou’s gentlemen, had been found carrying incriminating letters from Lancastrian exiles and was tortured ‘by burning in the feet until he confessed many things’. He named a man called John Hawkins as a Lancastrian supporter; Hawkins, in turn, accused Sir Thomas Cook. But what had set Cook at odds with the Yorkist dynasty? The
Great Chronicle of London
suggests that Elizabeth Woodville’s mother, whose insultingly low offer for a fine tapestry he had refused, was seeking her revenge.