Blood Sisters (15 page)

Warwick’s army had moved south. The mayor of London was trying to raise a defence, but a Lancastrian supporter had thrown open Southwark jail and a mob burst out. There is a vivid description of Queen Elizabeth releasing the Tower to the mayor’s control: he is leading her family to the waterside, she holding a chest of jewels, while her daughters drag bedsheets stuffed with clothing behind them to the boats which would carry them upriver to Westminster Abbey and sanctuary.

On 1 October the Tower fell. Two days later, though Elizabeth and her daughters would not have known it, Edward, his brother Richard and Elizabeth’s brother Anthony commandeered a boat to the Low Countries and eventually sought refuge with Edward’s sister, Margaret of Burgundy. The Yorkist regime was over – for the moment, anyway.

TEN

That Was a Queen

Thyself a queen, for me that was a queen,

Outlive thy glory, like my wretched self.

Richard III
, 1.3

Warwick’s Lancastrian supporters came flooding up from Kent, and three days later the earl himself entered the city and did at least calm the rioting. He also released King Henry from imprisonment, although the befuddled king seemed hardly to care that he had once again reclaimed the throne. Elizabeth Woodville was (in official parlance) no longer queen, Cecily Neville no longer the mother of a king, albeit that another of her sons was prominent on the victorious side. The four-year-old Elizabeth of York and her younger sisters were staying somewhere in the mass of low-lying buildings between Westminster Abbey and the river. They probably lived in the abbot’s house, where Abbot Mylling certainly received them with kindness and offered occasional luxuries, while a London butcher provided ‘half a beef and two muttons’ every week. None the less the official Yorkist narrative of these months,
The Historie of the Arrivall of Edward IV in England
, describes Elizabeth Woodville at least as enduring ‘great trouble, sorrow, and heaviness, which she sustained with all manner patience that belonged to any creature’.

Meanwhile in Burgundy Duchess Margaret, in warm remembrance of her Yorkist roots, sent letters to her refugee brothers Edward and Richard, while her husband the duke sent funds. Margaret was concerned above all to heal the rifts in her family, but the appearance of these new exiles was something of an embarrassment to a duke still anxious to keep peace with the rapacious French. It was not until Christmas that the new arrivals were invited to join the Burgundian court, France’s hostile intentions towards its neighbour having at last become unmistakeable. Still, Margaret, delighted at being allowed to meet and help her two brothers, was active in raising money for their cause.

For Margaret Beaufort in England, the news of Warwick’s take-over had been welcome. The Lancastrians were back, supported by Jasper Tudor who had sailed with Warwick’s fleet in September, and young Henry Tudor could be handed over into his uncle’s custody. By the end of October, Jasper and Henry were in London and Margaret, reunited with her son, took him to see his restored uncle Henry VI who (as Polydore Vergil later told it) prophesied future greatness for the boy. With her son and husband she then travelled to Woking for what sounds like a joyous holiday before handing her son back to his uncle Jasper, to be trained as a nobleman should be, while she herself resumed negotiations with Clarence about his inheritance.

On 2 November 1470 Elizabeth Woodville, still in sanctuary at Westminster, gave birth to a boy. The arrival of a long-awaited son and heir should have been a moment of the greatest triumph for her, but at this moment now no one could tell what his future would be. A prince should have had a cradle canopied in cloth of gold, an ermine-trimmed blanket and the grandest of christenings. Instead, with his grandmother Jacquetta and the abbot for godparents, the baby Edward was baptised in the Abbey ‘like a poor man’s child’. In a sense he was indeed temporarily a poor man’s child – or at least a poor woman’s. Henry VI was restrained about claiming back Yorkist lands; he did, however, seize the dower properties of Elizabeth and Jacquetta.

Elizabeth’s treacherous brother-in-law, Clarence, had ridden behind Warwick as he entered London, but as the weeks wore on he was once again becoming increasingly disaffected. The marriage deal between Warwick and Marguerite had neatly cut him out. Curiously, Marguerite, whose return to England would surely have confirmed the authority and permanence of the new regime, was still across the Channel. She and her son, with Warwick’s wife and daughters, had spent the autumn at the French court, where the records of Louis’ receiver of finance show monies paid out for their maintenance, for their silverware, ‘for their pleasures’. Marguerite’s delay might indicate not only a lack of eagerness to be reunited with her husband, but also that she had never connected with England emotionally. Perhaps, though, it may have been simply that Louis demanded her and Anne’s presence as a guarantee of Warwick’s honesty – they were hostages, in the nicest possible way.

After the news of Warwick’s success, Anne Neville and Edward of Lancaster were finally married in Amboise on 13 December. Her mother and sister were present. It is unclear whether the marriage was immediately consummated, the one way of making it irrevocable – several years later Crowland was still describing Anne as a ‘maiden’. On the day after the wedding they left for a ceremonial entry into the city of Paris.

It was well after Christmas before Marguerite set out for Rouen, where she expected to find Warwick waiting to escort her back to England. In fact he had remained in England, having more urgent business to attend to. When she finally realised he was not coming, and travelled to the coast without him, not only were the winds unfavourable but frightening rumours urged caution. It was almost the end of March 1471 before the party attempted to set sail, only to be held up further by those contrary winds.

The delay was fatal. On 11 March Edward, with his brother Richard of Gloucester and his brother-in-law Anthony Woodville, had sailed back to England with a new army. He landed three days later north of the river Humber, winning his welcome into the city of York with the now traditional announcement that he sought only his father’s inheritance as Duke of York. Working their way southwards, his forces set up camp outside the town of Warwick where the opposing army was led by Clarence. And there, amazingly, the two elder York brothers were reconciled. It was an extraordinary, dramatic turn of events.

Marguerite of Anjou and her new daughter-in-law must have suffered the bitterness of knowing that, if only they had arrived earlier, the pulls and fractions within the Lancastrian party, the support in the country, might have played out very differently. Anne’s sister Isabel had crossed the Channel to England earlier to be with her husband Clarence, the results of whose deliberations now placed her on the opposite side to her father, mother and sister. But the
Arrivall
reports that Edward and Clarence were under pressure from their own female relatives, with ‘the high and mighty princess my Lady, their mother; my lady of Exeter, my lady of Suffolk, their sisters … and, most specially, my Lady of Bourgoigne [Burgundy]’ mediating between the two ‘by right covert ways and means’. Other sources too record Margaret’s ‘great and diligent efforts’, her streams of messengers: Crowland says Clarence had been reconciled to his brother ‘by the mediation of his sisters, the Duchesses of Burgundy and Exeter’, the former working on the king and the latter on the duke. Some suspected a deal had been under negotiation for months – a deal with Margaret of Burgundy as the go-between.

When Clarence had been in Calais the previous year, says the continental writer Philippe de Commynes,
¹⁵
he had been approached by a mysterious Englishwoman ‘of few words’ who claimed she had come from England to serve the duchess (Clarence’s wife Isabel) as waiting woman, and requested a private interview. When they were alone, she produced a letter from Edward offering full forgiveness if he would return to the fold. Clarence gave an ambiguous promise to return and the lady, ‘the only contriver of the enterprise’, departed as mysteriously as she had arrived.

After the battlefield reconciliation Margaret of Burgundy wrote a description to her mother-in-law: ‘Clarence with a small company left his people behind him and approached my lord and brother who saw him coming and Lord Clarence threw himself on his knees so that my lord and brother seeing his humility and hearing his words, lifted him up and embraced him several times and gave him his good cheer… .’

For the Earl of Warwick, this was catastrophe – for him and, of course, for all those women still tied to the Lancastrian side. Clarence tried to mediate a deal between his brother and his father-in-law, but to no avail. Edward retook London in a bloodless coup, making sure as he neared the city to send ‘comfortable messages to the Queen’ – Elizabeth Woodville. Most of the Lancastrians powerful enough to stand against him were heading for the West Country to greet Marguerite – the attempt to rally forces against Edward was led by Sir Thomas Cook, the man with whom Jacquetta had quarrelled over a tapestry. Henry returned without argument to captivity in the Tower, while Edward moved in procession towards Westminster. His reunion with his family – now the richer by that all-important baby boy, his father’s ‘most desired treasure’ – was a great propaganda opportunity. In the words of a later ballad:

The King comforted the Queen and the other ladies eke.

His sweet baby full tenderly he did kiss.

The young prince he beheld and in his arms did bear.

Thus his bale turned him to bliss.

But of course things were not quite that sunny, and Fortune’s wheel could turn yet again. Despite the blow of Clarence’s defection Warwick could never be underestimated, and Marguerite was known to be on the way with a French army. Edward sent his family to his mother’s home of Baynard’s Castle, where Clarence and Gloucester joined them for the night. It was Holy Thursday, a few days before Easter, but Elizabeth Woodville’s feelings must have been less than Christian as she looked at Clarence, the man who had been instrumental in putting her through so much.

Two days later on Good Friday Edward returned to London, to take his family to the Tower for safety while he rode out again. On Easter Day his force met Warwick’s at Barnet
¹⁶
in a fog so dense that some suggested it must have been raised by witchcraft, or, as the chronicler Fabian put it, ‘incantations’. The fighting was intense and bloody, and among the many fatalities was the Earl of Warwick.

Cecily’s son had now killed her nephew: the ‘Kingmaker’ had played his last hand in English politics. When Marguerite and her son at long last landed at Weymouth in Dorset on the evening of 14 April the battle was long decided, although she could not have known it. She had reached Cerne Abbey before, next day, the news arrived that caused her to fall to the ground ‘like a woman all dismayed for fear … her heart was pierced with sorrow, her speech was in a manner gone, all her spirits were tormented with melancholy’. But she rallied herself and moved through the West Country trying to drum up support, cheered in Bristol by a reception warm enough to give her ‘new courage’.

Nor did those on the other side have it altogether easy. In London, the Lancastrians had not given up all hope of the city. The mayor and aldermen had to send a message to Edward begging him to come back to the defence ‘of the Queen, then being in the Tower of London, my Lord Prince, and my Ladies his daughters … and of the city’, all in ‘the greatest jeopardy’. The royal women felt the Tower shake as below them the Bastard of Falconbridge, a captain and kinsman of Warwick’s, turned his guns on the city; seven hundred men died under his onslaught. But overall the tide was still running the Yorkists’ way. Philippe de Commynes heard that one reason London welcomed Edward back was his wife Elizabeth. Not only had she borne a son in Westminster, but Londoners were grateful that she had retreated into sanctuary instead of expecting citizens to risk their lives and livelihoods to defend her position. As well as a private pleasure, she had become a political asset for Edward. The parliament of 1472 would put forward a commendation ‘of the womanly behaviour and the great constance of the Queen’.
¹⁷
At the times of their marriages, Marguerite of Anjou had looked a more suitable queen of England than Elizabeth Woodville; but now the positions were reversed.

As for the other, Lancastrian, queen, the
Arrivall
tells of the frantic, exhausting progress of Marguerite and her son at the beginning of May, Anne perforce with them, though her state must have been pitiable – a fourteen-year-old cut off from her own family and now no use to her in-laws. On the afternoon of the 3rd the Lancastrian army – powerful now in numbers, but exhausted by a 36-mile march in ‘foul country’ – arrived at Tewkesbury. The ladies of the party retired to a nearby manor for the night, but Hall describes Marguerite riding around the field next morning to encourage her soldiers.

The Duke of Somerset and Marguerite’s son (the Prince of Wales, Anne Neville’s husband) led the Lancastrian forces; Edward and Richard of Gloucester (with Edward’s friend Lord Hastings, and Elizabeth Woodville’s eldest son, now Marquess of Dorset) were at the head of the rather fewer but more ex-perienced Yorkist troops. For the Yorkists it was to be a flamboyant victory, though one so bloody that the fleeing Lancastrians were slaughtered even as they tried to cross the river Severn or seek sanctuary in Tewkesbury Abbey. Among those killed was Marguerite’s son – with question marks over whether he died in battle or was put to death afterwards. The deed was long laid at Richard’s door despite the lack of evidence; Edward as king would in any case have to bear the ultimate responsibility.