The Woodvilles: The Wars of the Roses and England's Most Infamous Family (13 page)

Annette Carson, while not matching Hampton in sheer creativity, nonetheless quotes his reconstruction of Edward IV’s wedding night approvingly before positing her own rather operatic theory: that Edward was given a love potion by the queen and her mother. ‘[W]as he fed a potent cocktail of aphrodisiacs and love-charms and intoxicating potions to confound his senses and induce him to answer “Yes” when asked, “Do you intend to marry this woman?”’
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While this scenario is not as far-fetched as Hampton’s – one of the charges against Eleanor Cobham had been that she procured ‘medicines and drynkis’ in order to induce Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester ‘to love her and wed her’
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– it is still rather implausible. Unless the potion was exceptionally long-acting, it would have surely worn off well before Edward announced his marriage at Reading. Are we really to believe that a man who had fought his way to the throne at age 18 was incapable of disentangling himself from a marriage he had been tricked into making? Elizabeth might have been able to embarrass Edward had she raised a fuss over his refusal to acknowledge his marriage, but if the matter came down to the king’s word versus that of a relatively impoverished widow with Lancastrian connections, it is not difficult to imagine which party would have prevailed.

The fact remains that there is simply no evidence, other than the unproven assertions of Jacquetta’s and Elizabeth’s enemies, that Elizabeth used anything other than conventional means – beauty and a winning personality – to lure Edward into marriage. (After all, no fewer than four commoners appealed sufficiently to Edward’s grandson Henry VIII for him to marry them – all without benefit of witchcraft or sorcery.) Thomas Wake’s ‘evidence’ – which, it should be remembered, involved images, not Hampton’s Grand Sabbaths or Carson’s elixirs of love – crumbled in the face of Edward IV’s recovered power, and Jacquetta vigorously denied his accusations. As for the 1484 accusations against mother and daughter, Richard III’s parliament put forth no evidence at all to support the claim that Jacquetta and Elizabeth had practised witchcraft to bring about Elizabeth’s royal marriage. By that time, Jacquetta was dead and could not defend herself. While Elizabeth never denied the allegations, she was hardly in a position to stand up to Richard III, who had executed her brother Anthony and her son Richard Grey and who had her royal sons in his power (if they had not already been disposed of). When Henry VII came to the throne and ordered the destruction of Titulus Regius, the Act of Parliament invalidating Elizabeth’s marriage to Edward, there was no longer any need for Elizabeth to defend the validity of her marriage, especially when Henry tacitly affirmed the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s children by marrying her eldest daughter.

It is not inconceivable, of course, that Jacquetta and Elizabeth employed supernatural means to lure Edward into marriage or against the unidentified knight whose image was supposedly in Jacquetta’s possession. As Jessica Freeman notes, women like Margery Jourdemayne, the Duchess of Gloucester’s associate, offered services to clients such as love potions and fertility charms; indeed, the duchess acknowledged employing Margery to help her bear a child by Humphrey. Authorities in fifteenth-century England were tolerant of such ‘practical magic’ if it was not employed to harm others.
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The fact that a high-ranking lady such as the Duchess of Gloucester, whose husband was next in line for the throne at the time, could mingle with the likes of Margery shows that high status was no bar to one’s dabbling in witchcraft. But because the allegations against Jacquetta and Elizabeth came solely from their enemies in times of turmoil, and were vigorously denied by one of the ladies in question, we should at the very least regard the accusations against them with the greatest of scepticism.

In October 1469, John Paston II wrote a letter to his mother updating her on events:

    The King himself has good language of the lords of Clarence, of Warwick, and of my lords of York, of Oxford, saying that they be his best friends. But his household men have other language, so what shall hastily fall I cannot see.
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Paston was right to have his doubts about the situation between Edward and his erstwhile enemies following Warwick’s short-lived hostile takeover, but in the autumn of 1469, a sullen peace had settled over the court after a series of largely behind-the-scenes negotiations between Edward and his rebellious lords.
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It could not have been easy for the Woodvilles. The possibility of being tried for witchcraft still loomed for Jacquetta, and she and her children would have been mourning the loss of Earl Rivers and John as well. The one bright spot would have been Anthony’s safe return to court, bearing his father’s title of Earl Rivers. During the upheavals of the summer, John Knyvet, who had disputed Anthony’s title to the manors of Babingley and Wolferton, had seized them as well as Middleton and Sandringham; by November, he was forced to return them to the new earl.
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By the spring of 1470, Warwick and his son-in-law Clarence had returned to their old tricks. Unable to take on the royal forces, the pair, along with their wives and Warwick’s youngest daughter, Anne, took ship with the plan of landing at Calais. Meanwhile, Warwick sent Sir Geoffrey Gate to Southampton to retrieve his ship, the
Trinity
, from its dock at Southampton. Edward, however, was ready for him and had already ordered Anthony, Earl Rivers, to guard Southampton. Unlike the debacle at Sandwich years before, Rivers was ready for attack. He captured a number of their ships and many of those onboard, twenty of whom would later be hanged, drawn, and quartered at the order of John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester, sent to Southampton to judge them.
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As Gate had been involved in the murders of his father and brother, Anthony must have found his humiliation particularly gratifying, although Gate was not condemned to death by Worcester.
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Barred from Calais, Warwick did not lose his nerve even when his heavily pregnant daughter, the Duchess of Clarence, gave birth aboard ship to a child, who did not survive his ordeal. He turned to piracy and captured about forty vessels. By 1 May, Warwick was at Honfleur, while the French king, Louis XI, was pondering how to make the most of this visitor.
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On 11 June, Anthony was appointed Governor and Lieutenant of Calais and Guines. He set off from Southampton with a fleet, which combined with the Duke of Burgundy’s ships to attack Warwick’s ships. After a fight at sea where 500 to 600 men were killed, Anthony and Hans Voetken seized fourteen of the ships carried off by Warwick during his piratical adventures.
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Meanwhile, Jacquetta Woodville took the opportunity of Warwick’s status as a rebel to bring an action in the King’s Bench for the murder of her husband. Chief among those men ordered to be brought before the court in June 1470 was Warwick himself, along with such distinguished men as John Langstrother, prior of the hospital of St John of Jerusalem, Sir Geoffrey Gate (the same man who had been captured by Anthony Woodville at Southampton), and Sir Edward Grey, ‘late of Groby in the county of Leicester’. Not surprisingly, Thomas Wake, who had accused Jacquetta of witchcraft, was on the list as well.
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I have found no further documents regarding this action; probably it was brought to a standstill by the events that were soon to transpire.

In France, Louis XI soon succeeded in bringing together two unlikely allies: Warwick and his old enemy Margaret of Anjou, Henry VI’s exiled queen. Henry VI had been shut up in the Tower since 1465, but his son, Edward, a small boy when he accompanied his mother into exile, was now nearly 17, old enough to join the fight for the English crown. For Louis XI, putting Henry VI back on the throne – a throne that would presumably be controlled by Warwick – would punish his old enemy Edward IV and gain him an ally against Burgundy.
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He persuaded Warwick and Margaret to seal their alliance by marrying Edward to Warwick’s younger daughter, Anne. On 25 July 1470 at Angers, the home of Margaret’s father René of Anjou, the young couple were betrothed.
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Having sworn to recover Henry VI’s throne for him, Warwick sailed for England in September – leaving his family and his new son-in-law behind, for a wary Margaret was not willing to send her son to England until Warwick had fulfilled his part of the bargain.
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Astonishingly, he succeeded. Lured away from London by more turmoil in the north, King Edward had lodged the heavily pregnant queen and his daughters in the Tower and left the city at the end of July. Apparently believing that his presence was more needed in the north than it was in London, he was still in Yorkshire in mid-September when news arrived that Warwick had landed in the West Country. Edward set out toward London but was greeted on the way by the news that John Neville, Marquis of Montagu – Warwick’s younger brother, but hitherto faithful to Edward – had shifted his loyalties toward Warwick. Believing that flight was his best option, Edward, accompanied by Anthony Woodville and his other followers, hastened to Bishop’s Lynn (now King’s Lynn), near Anthony’s manor of Middleton, where they arrived on 30 September. Having obtained the necessary ships, probably with the assistance of Anthony, on 2 October the king, accompanied by a band of loyalists that included Anthony and William, Lord Hastings, sailed into exile. The royal party, short of funds and of the furred gown Edward had to give the master of ships in reward for his passage, found shelter at the Hague with Louis de Bruges, who served as Governor of Holland for Edward IV’s brother-in-law Charles, Duke of Burgundy.
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Later, the exiles moved to Bruges. Since Louis was noted for his fine library, the bibliophilic Anthony’s stay in exile could not have been without its compensations.

Back in London, Edward IV’s supporters were hastening into sanctuary, Lancastrians were just as hastily scrambling out of it, and Geoffrey Gate was releasing adherents to the House of Lancaster from the King’s Bench prison. A thirsty mob began to rob and plunder beerhouses outside the city, though the mayor and the Londoners managed to keep the crowd outside the city gates. Fearing that the Kentishmen – who had entered London with Jack Cade at their head two decades before – would ‘despoil and kill’ her, Elizabeth, joined by her daughters and by her mother, secretly fled into sanctuary on 1 October. She had previously fortified the Tower, which she now handed over to the mayor and the alderman, who in turn agreed with Geoffrey Gate that all those within would be conducted to sanctuary, either at Westminster Abbey or at St Martin’s.
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The queen’s apartments in the Tower, which had been furnished comfortably for her lying-in, were given over on 3 October to the restored Henry VI, who had been in less spacious quarters elsewhere in the Tower. Presumably the cradles that would have been made ready for Elizabeth’s child were thoughtfully moved out of the king’s way.

Although the fate of Elizabeth’s father and brother, John, had given the queen good cause to worry about her prospects at the hands of a government controlled by Warwick, the earl was in fact considerate toward the Yorkist queen. This may have been because Warwick scorned to harm a woman, or perhaps he might have been influenced by the Earl of Oxford, who would be noted later on for his kind dealing with the widows of the vanquished, or by Henry VI himself. Only the Earl of Worcester, who had executed Warwick’s men following Anthony Woodville’s capture of them at Southampton, was sent to the block, perhaps at the behest of Oxford, whose father and elder brother had been executed by Worcester years before.

William Gould, a London butcher, kept the queen supplied with ‘half a beef’ and two muttons each week, for which he was later duly rewarded by the restored king.
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On 30 October 1470, the king’s council appointed Elizabeth, Lady Scrope, to attend the queen, for which she received £10. The appointment was a timely one, for on 2 November, the king’s first royal son, Edward, made his arrival into the world.
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Despite the awkwardness of having a Yorkist heir born in a Lancastrian England, the boy was christened in Westminster Abbey, with Lady Scrope serving as the godmother and the abbot and prior of Westminster, Thomas Milling and John Eastney, serving as his godfathers.
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