Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
chronicler, the Abbot of St Albans John Whethamsted, left a long and vivid description of the misstep into which York’s ‘exaltation of mood’ led him; right down to the distribution of the major players around Westminster palace. York strode to the parliamentary chamber and laid his hand upon the throne as if to claim it. He waited for the applause which, however, failed to come and then (the king being ‘in the queen’s apartments’) moved to the principal chamber of the palace, smashing the locks to gain his entry.
People of all ‘estates and ranks, age, sex, order and condition’ had begun to murmur against York’s presumption. By the end of October 1460 a deal had been hammered out by which Henry would keep the throne for his lifetime but would not be succeeded by his son. Instead, York and York’s sons would be his heirs, an idea presumably made more plausible by that long whispering campaign suggesting Marguerite’s infidelity. Such a prospect, with its huge advancement for her children, must have been welcome to Cecily. But of course Marguerite, whose own young son had been disinherited, was never going to accept it quietly.
Towards the end of the year she took ship northwards from Wales. Marguerite’s plan was to appeal for help from the Scots – where, ironically, another woman, Mary of Guelders, was commencing her rule as regent on behalf of her eight-year-old son James, her husband having recently been killed by an exploding cannon while besieging Yorkist sympathisers at Roxburgh. Mary sent an envoy to escort Marguerite and her young son to Dumfries and Lincluden Abbey where they were royally entertained and herself came down to meet them. The two queens spent twelve days together at the abbey; and Mary promised military aid, offering the hospitality of the Scottish royal palaces while it was assembled. Moving into England with a foreign army would do little to increase her popularity, but Marguerite was in no mood to worry.
With Henry’s captivity she had now become the undisputed leader of what was beginning to look like a genuine opposition party: stripped of much she had once enjoyed, but liberated for the first time to act openly on her own initiative. The Yorkist lords, according to Gregory’s Chronicle, tried to lure Marguerite back to London with faked messages from her husband, ‘for they knew well that all the workings that were done grew by her, for she was more wittier than the king …’.
As the Duke of York moved north to meet the impending Lancastrian threat, Marguerite’s name was being invoked by friends and enemies alike – even before she was ready to leave Scotland. York, holed up in his own Sandal Castle, was advised (says the Tudor writer Hall, whose grandfather had been the adviser concerned) not to sally out, but answered it would be dishonour to do so ‘for dread of a scolding woman, whose only weapons are her tongue and her nails’. The Lancastrian herald, trying to provoke York into taking a dangerous offensive, sneered that he should allow himself ‘to be tamely braved by a woman’.
York should have heeded all the warnings. For now, once again, it would be Cecily’s turn to drink a bitter cup. No wonder she, like Margaret Beaufort, would remember the image of Fortune’s wheel; and would, perhaps ironically, bequeath a bed decorated with that image to the Tudor dynasty. In the words of an anonymous poem:
I have see fall to men of high nobleness –
First wealth, and then again distress,
Now up, now down, as fortune turneth her wheel
On December 30 the royal forces (under the command of the third Duke of Somerset, Margaret Beaufort’s cousin, who shared his father’s and uncle’s strong Lancastrian loyalty) met the Yorkists at the battle of Wakefield. The Yorkists were defeated; and casualties of the rout included York himself, pulled from his horse in the thick of the fray and his seventeen-year-old son Edmund, with whose death Shakespeare would make such play. Salisbury (whose son had also died) was killed the next day. Their heads were set on spikes on the gates of York city, the duke’s capped with a paper crown. Tudor chroniclers like Hall and Holinshed,36 followed by Shakespeare, had the heads presented to a savagely vengeful Marguerite. But in fact Marguerite left Scotland only after news of the victory, travelling southwards in an outfit of black and silver lent to her by the Scottish queen Mary.
Cecily had lost a husband, a son, a brother, and a nephew. The news must have reached her and her three youngest children in London, probably at Baynard’s Castle, with the taste of the Christmas feasts still in their mouths. A great house like Baynard’s Castle with its gardens and terraces, its great hall and its courtyards capable of holding the four hundred armed men the Duke had once brought with him from Ireland, must have seemed a place of refuge in a treacherously shifting world. But the Duke of York’s death brought to an end a long and in many ways happy union. It had also narrowly deprived Cecily of her chance of being queen, and she would not forget it easily.
Marguerite’s party were once more in the ascendant. As the queen came south with her forces, some time in January or early February 1461, she sent letters – one on her own behalf, and one in the name of her young son – to the authorities of London, demanding the city’s loyalty. The one from the seven-year-old prince presents him as the active avenger, heading his army, and mentions his mother only as a potential victim. Marguerite’s own letter is obliged to suggest that she is acting in tandem with her young son; but it does present her forcefully: ‘Praying you, on our most hearty and desirous wise, that [above] all earthly things you will diligently intend [attend] to the surety of my lord’s royal person in the mean time; so that through malice of his said enemy he be no more troubled, vexed, or jeoparded. And, by so doing, we shall be unto you such a lady as of reason you shall largely be content.’
As her army swept ever southwards, her troops pillaged the land37 and, unable to pay them, she did nothing to prevent it. Their actions did much to sour her subsequent reputation, besides providing fuel for Yorkist propaganda that implicitly linked this catastrophic ‘misrule’ with the parallel reversal of right order represented by a woman’s leadership.
After the second battle of St Albans, on 17 February 1461, the reports were full of mentions of the queen or the queen’s party. One source, the Milanese ambassador in France, Prospero di Camulio, seems even to suggest that this time she was in the thick of the fray: ‘The earl of Warwick decided to quit the field, and … pushed through right into Albano [St Albans], where the queen was with 30,000 men.’ The chronicler Gregory wrote that in the midst of the battle ‘King Harry went to his queen and forsook all his lords, and trusted better to her party than to his own. …’ One anecdotal report of a speech Marguerite once made to her men is as heroic in its way as Elizabeth I’s at Tilbury: ‘I have often broken [the English] battle line. I have mowed down ranks far more stubborn than theirs are now. You who once followed a peasant girl [Joan of Arc] now follow a queen … I will either conquer or be conquered with you.’
Marguerite had by now experienced far more warfare than most ladies of her time. She had known the tension beforehand, mounting to fever pitch; the fear that each step of your horse’s hoof could bring it down on the sharp point of a hidden caltrop, before men rushed out from ambush to claim you as their prey; and the roads afterwards, crammed with the bodies of horses and with bleeding, dying men who lacked even the strength to crawl away.
When the engagement at St Albans was over King Henry, brought there by Warwick under guard, was found seated under an oak tree, and Marguerite was reunited with her husband. As the couple halted outside London the city officials requested that a carefully chosen delegation of ladies should act in the traditional way as go-betweens, interceding with Marguerite ‘for to be benevolent and owe goodwill to the city’. The ladies were Ismanie, Lady Scales38 who had been among those escorting Marguerite from France and who had remained in her household; the widowed Duchess of Buckingham, Cecily of York’s sister, whose husband had been killed the previous summer fighting in the Lancastrian cause; and Jacquetta, dowager Duchess of Bedford, another member of the party that had escorted Marguerite to England. Of the princely house of Luxembourg, and married in her youth to Henry VI’s uncle John, Jacquetta had been widowed in 1435 at the age of nineteen; ‘minding also to marry rather for pleasure than for honour, without counsel of her friends’ she had promptly taken as her second husband ‘a lusty knight, Sir Richard Woodville’. Jacquetta had remained close to the queen; and indeed her eldest daughter Elizabeth39 may have been one of Marguerite’s ladies.