Blood Sisters (18 page)

As part of the peace deal the French king had offered Edward 50,000 crowns (
£
10,000) in exchange for Marguerite of Anjou signing over to him all rights of inheritance in her parents’ lands. The wording of the documents denies she had ever been a queen of England, let alone one of the most active in that country’s history. Louis signed an agreement concerning ‘the daughter of the King of Sicily’; and it was as ‘I, Margaret, formerly married in the Kingdom of England’ that Marguerite herself was forced to renounce ‘all that I could pretend to in England by the articles of my marriage’.

An entry in the roll of accounts reads: ‘To Richard Haute, esquire, paid as a reward for the costs and expenses incurred by him for conducting Margaret, lately called the Queen, from London to the town of Sandwich …’ From here, early in 1476, Marguerite was returned across the Channel to live as Louis’ pensioner; and there is no record of how she – who in the past had made her feelings so plain – felt about the decision. For a short while she may have enjoyed the company of her father, but René of Anjou died in 1479. Holinshed in his sixteenth-century chronicles would moralise on the subject, describing how ‘this queen’ was ‘sent home again with as much misery and sorrow as she was received with pomp and triumph. Such is the instability of worldly felicity, and so wavering is false flattering fortune. Which mutation and change of the better for the worse could not but nettle and sting her with pensiveness, yea and any other person whatsoever that, having been in good estate, falleth into the contrary.’

Hall describes an equally gloomy scenario. ‘And where in the beginning of her time, she lived like a Queen, in the middle she ruled like an empress, towards the end she was vexed with trouble, never quiet nor in peace, and in her very extreme age she passed her days in France, more like a death than a life, languishing and mourning in continual sorrow, not so much for herself and her husband, whose ages were almost consumed and worn, but for the loss of prince Edward her son.’

TWELVE

Fortune’s Womb

Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune’s womb,

Is coming towards me, and my inward soul

With nothing trembles.

Richard II
, 2.2

These were the mature years of Edward IV’s kingship. Time would prove that fractures within the Yorkist dynasty had never entirely healed – but for the moment they were concealed.

In 1476 came a chance for the celebration of the dynasty. An illustration probably made around that time shows the royal family and court in an earthly equivalent of the sacred Trinity they reverenced. The king and his men kneel on one side, the queen and her ladies on the other, with Elizabeth’s mother-in-law Cecily behind her wearing as a cloak the royal arms of England. Everything was set for an extraordinary scene – the reburial of Richard, Duke of York, Edward’s father.

It had been more than fifteen years since the duke and his son Edmund had perished at the battle of Wakefield and been buried there in the north with the scant ceremony accorded to those on the losing side of any war. It was time for them to be reburied in an appropriately splendid tomb, in the church attached to the Midlands castle of Fotheringhay. The ten-day procession south was intended to show the people that the Yorkist regime was here to stay; besides fulfilling filial piety, naturally.

The trailing black draperies must have turned brown with dust as the days went by. They had chosen high summer for the journey to avoid the winter mud that might make the horses slip and fall – it would have been unthinkable for the hearse to tilt and upset its precious cargo. The country people, too, would be out in the fields at this season and would see the procession pass by. The black clothes of the noble mourners, the black velvet stretched on hoops over the vehicle that bore the coffins, would have stood out like a stab of darkness against the blue and gold of the countryside. And in the towns, every trade guild could send its own little train of riders and banners to pay their respects, proudly carrying with them their crosses, their holy water and their holy relics, without too much fear that rain would spoil the local officials’ best clothes or tarnish the gold embroidery.

It had been on or shortly before Sunday, 21 July, that the bodies had been exhumed, probably from the priory of St John the Evangelist near Pontefract Castle. Central to the ceremonials was a life-size effigy of the duke. This was an honour normally permitted only to kings, queens and bishops – so a point was being made in relation to the legitimisation of the current monarchy. The effigy used at a king’s funeral represented the public, symbolic body of the monarch, still present and active even when the physical body had died. This duke’s effigy was clad in dark blue, the colour of a king’s mourning, and an angel held a crown over his head to signify the same assumption of royal dignity that had led his widow Cecily to call herself ‘queen by right’.

As chief mourner, Richard, Duke of Gloucester rode directly behind the coffins. His habitual residence in the north made him the natural choice to escort his father’s body south. Behind him rode the nobles and officers, then four hundred poor men on foot, each carrying a taper. The choir of the Chapel Royal sang at each church where the bodies rested overnight. This extraordinary cortège travelled about 13 miles a day.

The church of Fotheringhay still stands, its three-storey tower and belfry odder-looking, if less impressive, today since the chancel and cloisters were destroyed after the Reformation. But of the castle, only a grassy mound remains. Yet nothing can destroy the grandeur of the setting, looking south over the once-great river Nene, surrounded by the hunting forest of Rockingham. Besides the castle complex, the church and the market town there was formerly a collegiate establishment large enough to boast twelve fellows or chaplains – a centre of learning and piety. In 1476 Fotheringhay had only recently been relinquished, at his insistence, by Edward’s mother Cecily. But whether or not she had gone willingly she would have approved her son’s intention for Fotheringhay – to make it into a mausoleum for the York family. The installation of magnificent stained-glass windows in the chapel, begun by Cecily, was now complete: hence the timing of this ceremony.
^fn6

The king, according to a herald’s account, met his father’s body at the entrance to the churchyard and ‘very humbly did his obeisance to the said body and laid his hand on the body and kissed it, weeping’. During the service he ‘had his chamberlain offer to the body seven pieces of cloth of gold and each piece was five yards long, and the queen had five yards offered by her chamberlain and they were laid in the shape of a cross on the said body’.
⁸

Cloth of gold was not necessarily gold in colour, more an indication of status. A sumptuary law of 1483 would state that no one ‘except the king, the queen, the king’s mother, the king’s children, his brothers and sister’ should wear it. Its mention during the Fotheringhay ceremonies is significant for another reason: it is the first time any woman has been referred to – even acting by proxy, and offering through her chamberlain – in the course of the obsequies.

The next day a horse was led to the church door, part of the traditional offering of the dead man’s knightly trappings: his coat of arms, shield, sword and helmet, each brought in by a different nobleman. ‘Then the king came to offer the mass penny, and in passing did his obeisance before the said body. Next the queen came to offer, dressed all in blue without a high headdress, and there she made a great obeisance and reverence to the said body, and next two of the king’s daughters came to offer in the same way.’ The daughters are not named but would surely have been the eldest – ten-year-old Elizabeth, recently betrothed to the French Dauphin, and Mary. That the queen came without a hennin – the tall pointed cone from which floated a flattering veil, or the veiled, backward-pointing ‘butterfly’ headdress – was presumably a conventional token of grief.

Another, French, account includes a fourth woman: ‘the king offered for the said prince his father and the queen and her two daughters and the countess of Richmond offered next.’ Since this account survives as a medley of late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century documents it is always possible that a later hand added the name of Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond – later, when her son Henry VII was on the throne, when she had become ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’, when her presence at any gathering would have become worthy of record and indeed tactful to do so. This could account for the fact that, apart from queen and her two daughters, she is the only woman mentioned specifically. But the blandly undescriptive words do infer just how well Margaret Beaufort was doing in trying to placate the ruling Yorkist family.

It is not recorded whether Anne, Duchess of Gloucester was at Fotheringhay, despite the conspicuous part played by her husband Richard. Her presence may have gone unremarked, as Anne Neville’s doings so often did; though surely, had she been there, she would have offered before Margaret Beaufort. Her absence may simply have been due to a pregnancy. If it were around now that Anne’s single child was born, after several years of marriage, it might have been good reason not to risk an arduous journey. In any case, there would have been no role for her in that stylised procession from the north.

There are, however, mentions of Anne in other records around this time. In 1475/6 she sent a message to the city of York, conveyed by one of her husband’s councillors, suggesting that she was able to deputise for him in his absence. In 1476 she was admitted to the sisterhood of Durham Cathedral priory. In December that year some of Richard’s payment warrants, issued from London, show purchases of furs and silk for ‘the most dear consort of the lord duke’. The following year she and Richard joined the guild of Corpus Christi at York and funded a chantry at Queens’ College, Cambridge. So there is probably no reason to read anything sinister into Anne’s absence – but one omission from the list of those present at the Fotheringhay ceremony does look more pointed.

It is hard not to read something into the apparent absence of the woman with most reason of all to be there – Cecily, Duchess of York, the dead man’s widow. It is true that royalty did not customarily attend funerals, and that a woman might in any case have no place at the actual funeral ceremony of a man. But this was not a funeral as such, and neither the king nor queen stayed away. A later account affirms Cecily’s continued affection for Fotheringhay: ‘Memorandum that the Lady Cicelye, Duchess of York mother to King Edward the iiijth, died at her castle of Berkhamstead, and was buried by [beside] her husband in the College of Fotheringhay.’ She may just have been ill – she was, after all, past sixty which was old for those times.

Maybe Cecily simply watched the ceremony,
⁹
instead of taking part. But when Margaret Beaufort, for example, was an observer during her son’s reign, her presence would be recorded. If Cecily had indeed been absent entirely, the question has to be why.

Cecily and Elizabeth Woodville were not, in this story, the only mother and daughter-in-law who did not always agree. Perhaps Cecily did not care to take a subordinate role to the daughter-in-law she despised as a low-born interloper – not at this, of all ceremonies.

It is tempting to read between the lines of a letter written in October 1476 by a member of the Stonor family. Elizabeth Stonor writes
¹⁰
to her husband of how she had attended the Duchess of Suffolk – the king’s sister Elizabeth – on a visit to Cecily Neville.

‘And also on Saturday last was I waited upon [the Duchess] again, and also from thence she waited upon my lady her Mother, and brought her to Greenwich to the King’s good grace and the queen’s: and there I saw the meeting between the King and my lady his Mother. And truly me thought it was a very good sight.’ It sounds almost as though Cecily failed to meet her daughter-in-law, even though Elizabeth Woodville was obviously at Greenwich. Worse, it sounds as though Edward’s sister had to ‘bring’ Cecily to see her son, and that the fact of her meeting her son was thought worth commenting on.

One letter perhaps written in 1474
¹¹
had been to her son Richard, about a servant and whether Richard had yet fulfilled ‘your promise made unto us at Syon … praying you that no man intromitt with our said servant’s matter, saving only our counsel learned and yours, as our faithful trust is in you.’ There is the sound of a mother’s finger wagging, and more specifically in the next lines: ‘Son, we trusted you should have been at Berkhamsted with my lord my son [Edward] at his last being there with us, and if it had pleased you to come at that time, you should have been right heartily welcome. And so you shall be whensoever you shall do the same, as God knoweth, whom we beseech to have you in governance.’ Though we need read no more into it than a mother’s natural desire to see as much as possible of her son, one could also perceive a desire to bind ties in what had already long been shown up as a dangerously fractured family.

The ranks of Cecily’s children had been diminished, at the start of 1476, by the death of her eldest daughter Anne in childbirth. Four years earlier Anne had obtained what the sixteenth-century chronicler John Stow called a divorce (probably an annulment) from her estranged husband the Duke of Exeter, and married her long-standing lover, the Kentish gentleman Thomas St Leger. By contrast Cecily’s second daughter Elizabeth,
¹²
Duchess of Suffolk, was enjoying an access of independence and influence after the death of her own formidable mother-in-law Alice Chaucer in 1475. But this particular scion of the York family seems, none the less, to have taken little personal part in political affairs. They were, on the other hand, the daily concern of Cecily’s youngest and grandest daughter, Margaret of Burgundy. And as 1477 dawned Cecily must have been worried also about her daughter across the Channel.