Blood Sisters (8 page)

Marguerite portrayed herself always as the king’s subordinate and adjunct, which was what was needed in the short term but in the long term both acted to the detriment of her authority and left her vulnerable to charges of exceeding her brief. It was as Marguerite managed to accrue more power to herself that the rumours really began to circulate about her sexual morality – as if the two things were two sides of the same unnatural coin.
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It was increasingly said that the prince was not the king’s son but perhaps Somerset’s – or not even hers, but a changeling. In February 1456 one John Helton, ‘an apprentice at court’, was hanged, drawn and quartered ‘for producing bills asserting that Prince Edward was not the queen’s son’.

The pageants that welcomed Marguerite into the city of Coventry on 14 September that year reflected the confusion about her role. In most of them she was represented as traditionally female – wife and mother – and praised particularly for her ‘virtuous life’. (Considering the aspersions that had been cast on her sexual virtue, a point was being made there, if, as is possible, Marguerite herself had any hand in framing the images.) She was hailed, hopefully if inappropriately, as a ‘model of meekness, dame Margaret’ – and though the ending made a show of the famously sword-wielding and dragon-slaying St Margaret, it was not before six famous conquerors had promised to give the saint’s less well-armed namesake their protection; of which, as a female, she clearly stood in need.

But that autumn the king called a council from which (so a correspondent of the Pastons’ wrote) the Duke of York withdrew ‘in right good conceit with the king, but not in great conceit with the Queen’.

By the beginning of 1457 – with the business of appointing a council for Marguerite’s baby son, with her order of a huge stock of arms for the Midlands castle of Kenilworth – the balance of power was running in favour of the queen. And when she paid another visit to Coventry, at the insistence of her officials she was escorted back out of the city by the mayor and sheriffs with virtually the same ceremonies that would have been accorded to the king, or so the city recorder noted with shock: ‘And so they did never before the Queen till then.’ Only the parade of the king’s sword was missing.
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But while Marguerite was acting so determinedly, others of her sex were still too young to play their role in the country’s history.

In Warwick Castle, on 11 June 1456, the Earl of Warwick’s wife Anne Beauchamp had given birth to their second daughter, Anne. Anne Beauchamp had come unexpectedly (and not without familial strife) into a vast inheritance, and since the Warwicks never produced sons her daughters Isabel and Anne Neville
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were early marked out as the greatest heiresses of their day. Anne would have a future as chequered as any in the fifteenth century – but at the moment, geographically close though they may have been to Queen Marguerite, her father and her family were prominent in the Yorkist cause. Meanwhile in far-off Wales, at Pembroke Castle, the young Lancastrian Margaret Beaufort was also about to have to take control of her own destiny.

FIVE

Captain Margaret

Where’s Captain Margaret to fence you now?

Henry VI Part 3
, 2.6

In 1455, shortly after her uncle Somerset had been killed in the queen’s cause, Margaret Beaufort had reached her twelfth birthday. Until this time, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, she had probably been left in her mother’s care, but when the king’s half-brother Edmund Tudor was sent to Wales as the king’s representative late that year he would almost certainly have been able to take Margaret with him as his wife. Popular opinion would have suggested that, even though it was now legal, consummation of the marriage should be delayed – the more so since Margaret was slight and undeveloped for her age. But other factors weighed more heavily with Edmund: fathering a child on Margaret would give him a life interest in her lands; and though there was now a Lancastrian heir, there was still not a spare. She became pregnant in the first half of 1456, some time before her thirteenth birthday. It would at best have been an anxious time for her, but worse was to follow. Edmund did not live to see the birth of his child. Captured at Carmarthen by an ally of the Duke of York’s, he was soon released but caught plague there and died in November.

Isolated in plague-ridden Wales and heavily pregnant, a terrified Margaret had only one ally close at hand – her brother-in-law Jasper Tudor, who, himself only in his early twenties, was called to take on this quasi-paternal role. She fled to his stronghold of Pembroke and it was there that on 28 January 1457 she gave birth to a boy.

The ceremony that was supposed to surround the birth of a possible heir to the throne was described in ordinances Margaret Beaufort herself laid down in later life for the birth of her first grandchild; and though there was obviously more ritual involved in the confinement of a queen than in that of a mere great lady, the essential goals were the same. The woman went apart, some weeks before the birth, into carefully prepared rooms: ‘Her Highness’s pleasure being understood as to what chamber it may please her to be delivered in, the same to be hung with rich cloth or arras, sides, roof, windows and all, except one window, which must be hanged so that she have light when it pleases her.’ She took communion, then progressed in state to her apartments; took wine and sweetmeats with her (male) officers and then bade them farewell. As she entered her chamber she passed into a female world, where ‘women are to be made all manner of officers, butlers, sewers and pages; receiving all needful things at the chamber door’. It was meant to create a protective environment for mother and child alike – perhaps conditions as near womb-like as possible.

After the birth a new mother was not allowed outdoors until she went for her ‘churching’ or purification some forty days later, accompanied by midwives and female attendants, bearing a lighted candle, to be sprinkled with holy water. Christine de Pizan gives a description of the lying-in of a mere merchant’s wife, who arranged that awe-struck visitors should walk past an ornamental bed and a dresser ‘decorated like an altar’ with silver vessels before even reaching her own bedchamber: ‘large and handsome’, with tapestries all around, and a bed made up with cobweb-fine display sheets, and even a gold-embroidered rug ‘on which one could walk’. ‘Sitting in the bed was the woman herself, dressed in crimson silk, propped up against large pillows covered in the same silk and decorated with pearl buttons, wearing the headdress of a lady.’ But it seems likely that Margaret Beaufort’s circumstances militated against any such pleasurable feminine display.

We know that women were as anxious then as now to take any precaution they could against the perils of childbirth: from a favourite midwife to the Virgin’s girdle. Even in a lower sphere of society, Margaret Paston was so eager to get the midwife she wanted that the woman – though incapacitated by a back injury – had to reassure her she’d be there, even if she had to be pushed in a barrow. What we do not know is to just what degree the conditions of the year or the remoteness of the place changed things for Margaret. But we know the birth did not go easily.

The labour was long and difficult. Both Margaret and the child were expected to die, and were there to be a choice some Church authorities urged that those in attendance should prioritise the unbaptised baby, even it were not a valuable boy. There seems little doubt that her physical immaturity was part of the problem – as her confessor John Fisher would later put it: ‘It seemed a miracle that of so little a personage anyone should have been born at all.’ She herself thought so, at least: in later years she would combine forces with her daughter-in-law Elizabeth of York to ensure that her young granddaughter and namesake Margaret was not sent to Scotland too early lest her new husband, the king of Scotland, would not wait to consummate the marriage ‘but injure her, and endanger her health’.

There seems little doubt that Margaret Beaufort was indelibly marked by her early experiences – perhaps physically,
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since neither of her two subsequent marriages produced any children, and certainly mentally.
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Contemporaries remarked on her sense of vulnerability. The image of Fortune’s wheel was impossible for contemporary commentators to avoid:

But Fortune with her smiling countenance strange

Of all our purpose may make sudden change.

So ran the jingle. Margaret’s confessor would say, in the ‘Mornynge Remembraunce’ sermon he preached a month after her death, that ‘she never was yet in that prosperity but the greater it was the more always she dread the adversity’. That whenever ‘she had full great joy, she let not to say, that some adversity would follow’. (However, the other early Tudor biographer, the court poet Bernard André,
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claimed that she was ‘steadfast and more stable than the weakness in women suggests’.)

Even the trauma she had suffered did not long subdue the young mother’s determination. There are few early proofs of Margaret Beaufort’s character, but, if the tale is true, this is surely one of them. The sixteenth-century Welsh chronicler Elis Gruffydd claimed that Jasper had the baby christened Owen; it was Margaret who forced the officiating bishop to christen him again with a name allied to the English throne – Henry.

The next few weeks – the beginning of her official period of mourning – would be spent at Pembroke caring for her delicate baby. But his birth demanded speedy action. In March, almost as soon as she was churched and received back into public life, she and her brother-in-law Jasper were travelling towards Newport and the home of the Duke of Buckingham. A new marriage had to be arranged for her,
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and an alliance that would protect her son. The choice was Henry Stafford, a mild man some twenty years older than she but, crucially, the second son of the Duke of Buckingham, a staunchly Lancastrian magnate almost as powerful as his brother-in-law the Duke of York – Anne, Duchess of Buckingham was Cecily Neville’s sister. A dispensation was needed, since the pair were second cousins; by 6 April it had been granted, although the actual marriage ceremony would not take place until Margaret’s mourning was complete, on 3 January 1458.

The bride, still only fourteen, would keep the grander title her first marriage had won her, Countess of Richmond, but she brought with her estates now enriched by her dowager’s rights. Her son Henry Tudor would at first probably have remained in Wales in his uncle’s care. But the arrangement appears to have been a happy one, with Margaret and her new husband visiting Jasper and baby Henry at Pembroke; the elder Buckinghams welcoming their new daughter-in-law (Duchess Anne would bequeath Margaret several choice books); and – despite the absence of any further children – every sign of contentment, at least, between the pair. Margaret would seem to have found a safe haven – except that events would not leave any haven tranquil and unmolested for long.

In the spring of 1458 the adversarial parties in the royal dispute were brought to the ceremony of formal reconciliation known as a ‘Loveday’. It was in everyone’s interest that some unity should be restored to the country. Queen Marguerite and the Duke of York walked hand in hand into church to exhibit their amity before God. The pose showed queenly intercession, peacemaking; but it also cast her as York’s equal and political match. Ironically, what might sound to modern ears like a tribute to her activities was actually a devaluation of her status: as queen, she was supposed to be above the fray. To remain on that pedestal might keep her immobile; but to step down from it exposed her vulnerability.

The pacific image was, moreover, misleading. In the summer and autumn of 1458 there were fresh clashes between Marguerite and the Yorkists. She had the Earl of Warwick summoned to London to account for acts of piracy he had committed while governor of Calais, to which post he had been appointed the previous year. He arrived with a large force of armed retainers wearing his livery, and his supporters rallied protests in the city against the queen and the authorities. Tensions deepened when Warwick narrowly escaped impalement on a spit as he passed through the royal kitchens. He claimed that the queen had paid the scullion who was wielding it to murder him. Later that year Marguerite left London. She was assembling a personal army – what one report described as ‘queen’s gallants’, sporting the livery badge of her little son.

A random letter preserved in the archives of Exeter Cathedral, concerning a snub to the crown’s candidate for the deanery, gives a taste of her mood at this time. It had been reported that some of the cathedral chapter were inclined to set aside the royal recommendations, to which news Marguerite retorted that it would be ‘to our great marvel and displeasure if it be so. Wherefore we desire and heartily pray you forthwith that for reverence of us … you will … be inclined and yield to the accomplishment of my lord’s invariable intention and our in this matter.’ It is notable that Henry’s letter of confirmation was shorter and feebler, and that the officer sent down to see that the royal will was done was Marguerite’s own master of jewels. But it is also true, of course, that as a woman she was only ever able to act in the name of her husband or of her tiny son.