Queen by Right (81 page)

Authors: Anne Easter Smith

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Biographical, #Romance, #General

BOOK: Queen by Right

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I also discovered a couple of genealogy charts that mentioned a Joan as being the Yorks’ first child, but she is missing from many of the better-known charts, probably because she died and was buried before proper registration. I chose to include her as she gave me an excuse for shortening the length of time between the miscarriage and the next pregnancy. Also, it was usual to
name a daughter for a grandmother, and as Cecily was with her mother for so long, it stands to reason one of Cecily’s daughters should have been named Joan.

Little Henry, having been born in February, died at some point before Richard and Cecily arrived in Normandy in 1441. P. A. Johnson (one of Richard’s biographers) suggested that perhaps Richard dallied so long before setting sail because of the death of their first son. Richard cited “personal” reasons to the council for the delay. I have no idea where or when Henry died, and so I chose Dorking in Surrey because that is where my family lived when I was growing up. I have taken many walks in the bluebell woods around Box Hill, and writing about it brought back fond memories.

Next I will confess that there is no evidence Cecily and Jeanne d’Arc ever met. However, as I describe, Cecily was in Rouen at the time and was in the same castle where Jeanne was imprisoned. I just could not resist having young, impressionable Cecily be fascinated by this astonishing young woman and find a way to speak to Jeanne. I hope you agree the scene is powerful. What staggered me when I began to research Jeanne’s trial is the amount of transcription that still exists. It took me a whole day to read it all. All my descriptions about Jeanne’s time at Rouen are accurate except for her meeting with Cecily. I have to confess that as a loyal Englishwoman, I have always looked on Jeanne as a ninny and a nuisance for my countrymen, but by the time I had finished the research and writing of those scenes, I was as convinced as Cecily that she was telling the truth about the voices in her head.

Another dramatic moment that I first learned of from Paul Murray Kendall in his
Richard III,
was the scene with Cecily all alone at the Ludlow market cross with her two little sons. I believe Professor Kendall took license with that scene, but it is not at all implausible, because Cecily was indeed left at Ludlow with her three youngest when Richard fled in the night, and the castle was sacked along with the town. But whether or not she took the walk to the market cross is subject to debate. Again, it was too powerful an image not to include in a novel, and I am convinced the Cecily I got to know over eighteen months of research and writing would have had the courage to do something like that!

I have left the most important of the “did it or did it not happen” instances to last. The rumor that Edward was not Richard’s son but the offspring of an archer named Blaybourne or Blackburn in Normandy came back to haunt the York family twice in the twenty-five years following Edward’s crowning. The
first time was in 1476, when Cecily’s son, George, was finally imprisoned by Edward for conspiring to take the crown one too many times, and he put it about that Edward was a bastard and shouldn’t be king. Then, in 1483, when Edward died suddenly and his twelve-year-old son was proclaimed king, two counts of bastardy were cited upon the poor boy by the preacher Dr. Shaw, who was defending the right of Richard III (Dickon) to be crowned instead. Shaw told the crowds gathered at Paul’s Cross that not only was Edward already married when he had wed his queen, Elizabeth Woodville, but that Edward himself was Cecily’s bastard by an archer of Rouen. Ann Wroe in her excellent book
Perkin
or
The Perfect Prince
says: “This seemed preposterous, but George, duke of Clarence, Edward’s wayward brother, was also said to have put such a story about; and Charles the Bold of Burgundy (Meg’s future husband)
^*. . . often called Edward
‘Blaybourne,’
in fits of rage, long before Dr. Shaw preached his sermon.”

And most interesting of all, Cecily herself was said to have flown “into such a frenzy,” when she heard of the marriage between her son and Elizabeth Woodville in 1464 “that she offered to submit to a public inquiry, and asserted that Edward was not the offspring of her husband the duke of York, but was conceived in adultery, and therefore in no wise worthy of the honour of kingship.” However, these lines are attributed to a visiting Italian in 1483 named Dominic Mancini, who we think was a spy for King Louis of France. He was certainly not hobnobbing with royalty, so could not have heard this from Cecily or her son, Dickon (Richard III), who was about to take the throne. Conjecture has it that his informant was Dr. Argentine, a court physician who had cared for Edward’s young sons but who became a trusted servant at Henry Tudor’s court. So although the rumor exists, I chose to take it with a large pinch of salt; the Cecily I came to know would have disdained such an affair with an archer, no matter how attractive.

However, Cecily did show her contempt for Elizabeth Woodville by insisting on being styled Cecily, the king’s mother, and late wife unto Richard, in right king of England and of France and lord of Ireland. In other words: queen by right.

Jacquetta Woodville was a fascinating character, said to have been involved in magic and witchcraft. She has been accused of using love potions on the young King Edward to help him fall in love with her beautiful widowed daughter Elizabeth. I don’t think Edward needed potions; he was a
strong-minded young man who loved the opposite sex, and the idea of a secret marriage between him and Elizabeth is perfectly plausible, especially when the story was revealed after his death that he may have been secretly married to another woman before Elizabeth. Jacquetta and Cecily were certainly together in Rouen, and I could not resist the delicious irony of creating friction between these two beautiful and strong-willed women who would one day be in-laws.

I love it when I find out details that can add to the authenticity of my books. England really did have a terrible summer in 1460, with floods, washed-out bridges and ruined crops causing great hardship for the people. “Forsooth and forsooth” and “by St. John” were Henry VI’s favorite oaths; and the extant letters between Richard and his teenage sons at Ludlow meant that I had to mention them. It showed me that, in the midst of all the political upheaval, Richard still took the time to parent. I also used actual wording of other letters in some instances, as well as the oath Henry and Richard swore in front of Parliament at Westminster in October 1460.

Cecily of York chose to disappear from public life not long after Edward’s disastrous—according to his mother—marriage to Elizabeth, Jacquetta’s beautiful daughter, preferring to lead a life of quiet piety with her ladies at her palace of Berkhampsted. She was present, however, at some great occasions during Edward’s reign, including a dinner in 1480 given in Meg’s honor when she, as duchess of Burgundy, returned to England for the first time following her marriage to Charles the Bold in 1468. Cecily also pleaded with Edward to spare her charming but perfidious son George’s life in 1477, to no avail, although it is thought it was Cecily who persuaded Edward to allow George to be executed quietly in his prison cell. She was not there when her youngest son, Dickon, was crowned in 1483 as Richard III, but contrary to some conjecture that she refused to attend because of the slanderous statements of Dr. Shaw, she and Richard exchanged some warm correspondence when he was king, and he visited her to ask her advice on at least one occasion.

Cecily of York lived just past her eightieth birthday to May 31, 1495, long enough to see Jeanne’s (fictitious) prediction come true in another generation: her granddaughter, Edward’s eldest child Elizabeth of York, married Henry VII, the first Tudor king, and was thus crowned queen of England. Their son was Henry VIII, and his daughter another Queen Elizabeth, and so on down to our own Queen Elizabeth today. Cecily Neville, duchess of York, was the ancestor of them all. Only Meg and Bess outlived their mother, and not by
much. Her daughter Anne died in childbirth in 1474, after remarriage to one Thomas St. Leger, a gentleman of no particular distinction except perhaps that Anne finally found love with him. Ned died at 41 and Dickon was killed at age 32 at the Battle of Bosworth on August 22, 1485.

No one has ever questioned the love match that Richard’s and Cecily’s arranged marriage turned out to be; it was a rare feat in the lives of the nobility in medieval times. It has been my privilege and pleasure to tell their story.

Anne Easter Smith
Newburyport, 2010

Below is a selection of the sources I used in researching
Queen by Right.

Books

Crawford, Anne.
The Yorkists.
London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007.

Curtis, Edmund.
A History of Medieval Ireland.
London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1923.

Gilbert, J. T.
History of the Viceroys of Ireland.
Dublin: James Duffer, 1865.

Green, V. H. H.
The Later Plantagenets.
London: Edward Arnold Ltd., 1955.

Griffiths, Ralph.
Reign of Henry VI.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981.

Johnson, P. A.
Richard, Duke of York.
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

Kendall, Paul Murray.
Richard III.
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1955.

———.
Warwick the Kingmaker.
London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957.

Lowell, Francis Cabot.
Joan of Arc.
New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1896.

Maurer, Helen.
Margaret of Anjou.
Woodbridge, Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2003.

Mortimer, Ian.
Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England.
London: The Bodley Head, 2008.

Norris, Herbert.
Medieval Costume and Fashion.
London: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1927.

Otway-Ruthven, A. J.
A History of Medieval Ireland.
London: Ernest Benn Ltd., 1968.

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
London: Oxford University Press.

Ross, Charles.
Edward IV.
London: Methuen, Ltd., 1983.

Scofield, Cora L.
The Life and Reign of Edward IV
(2 vols.). London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1967.

Shoesmith, Ron, and Andy Johnson.
Ludlow Castle: Its History & Buildings.
Almeley, England: Logaston Press, 2006.

Warkworth, John.
The Chronicles of the White Rose of York.
J. A. Giles, ed. London: James Bohn, 1843.

Articles

Davis, Marion. “Sheep, Cattle and Sword; Some Thoughts About Richard, Duke of York, 1411–1460.”
Ricardian Register,
Journal of Richard III Society, American Branch XXXVI, no. 4 (winter 2006).

Griffiths, Ralph. “Richard of York and the Royal Household in Wales 1449–1450.”
Welsh History Review
VIII (1976).

Hardcastle, M. S. “The Rose of Raby.”
The Monthly Chronicle of North Country Lore and Legend
(January 1890).

Noble, Mark. “Some Observations upon the Life of Cecily, Duchess of York.”
Archaeologia
13, 2nd edition (1807).

Postlethwaite, Ian. “Richard, Third Duke of York.”
The Journal of the Yorkshire Branch of the Richard III Society,
Leeds (1974).

Rawcliffe, Carole. “Richard, Duke of York, the King’s ‘Obeisant Liegeman.’”
The Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research
60, no. 142 (June 1987).

Glossary

acton
—quilted jacket worn under chainmail.

arras
—tapestry or wall hanging.

attainted
—imputed with dishonor or treason. Estates of attainted lords are often forfeited to the crown.

aumbrey
—cupboard.

avise
—to look closely, to study a person.

bailey
—outer wall of a castle.

baldachin
—a canopy over a throne or held over processing royalty.

bascinet
—a helmet.

basse danse
—slow, stately dance.

braies
—medieval men’s underwear, which were not unlike the loin cloths worn in India today. Short ones of fine lawn were worn under hose, and longer, heavier ones were worn by peasants as breeches.