Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
John Grey, father of her two young sons. Grey had recently died at the second battle of St Albans; and it was Elizabeth Woodville’s widowhood that would soon propel her into national history.
A letter reported that the delegation had returned to London on 20 February with news that ‘the king and queen had no mind to pillage the chief city and chamber of their realm, and so they promised; but at the same time they did not mean that they would not punish the evildoers’. The message was sufficiently ambiguous that there was still panic in the streets, and the ladies were sent out again two days later to request the Lancastrian leaders to enter the city without the main body of their army. The queen conceded; ironically, her decision to send only a small symbolic force into London, and her subsequent withdrawal to Dunstable, would prove to be arguably the biggest mistake of her life. The wheel was about to turn yet again.
The huge overturns of fortune did not come heralded in any way. In the weeks after the battle of Wakefield, Cecily Neville had been so afraid that she had sent her two younger sons, George and Richard, abroad to the safety of Burgundy. Yet almost as she did so her eldest son Edward and the Earl of Warwick, with their armies, were preparing to approach London from the west. On 27 February they were welcomed into the city, where Edward went to his mother’s house of Baynard’s Castle.
This time there was no talk of loyalty to King Henry – or of wishing only to rid him of his evil counsellors. On 1 March the Bishop of Exeter, Warwick’s brother, asked the eager Londoners whether they felt that Henry deserved to rule, ‘whereunto’, as the Great Chronicle of London reported, ‘the people cried hugely and said Nay. And after it was asked of them whether they would have the Earl of March [Edward] for their king and they cried with one voice, Yea, Yea.’
Cecily Neville’s eldest son, the ‘fair white rose’ of York, was still only eighteen but when, three days later, he was acclaimed and enthroned, his huge stature and glowing golden looks made him seem every inch the king. The youthful Edward with his royal bloodline was not only the favourite candidate backed by Warwick and the Neville party, but had recently proved his mettle with his victory at Mortimer’s Cross.
But the Yorkists had not yet completely won. London was not England. On 13 March, with Warwick already engaged recruiting men in the Midlands, King Edward marched his army north where Henry and Marguerite still commanded the loyalty of a majority of the nobility. Prospero di Camulio erroneously heard that Marguerite had given her husband poison, after persuading him to abdicate in favour of their son: ‘However these are rumours in which I do not repose much confidence.’ And very soon, after the dreadful battle of Towton, di Camulio was writing less cautiously.
Fought outside York in wintry weather, on an icy Palm Sunday, Towton is still probably the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. No detailed description survives, and the numbers of those involved, as estimated by contemporary reporters and later historians, vary wildly. But what is agreed is that this was a ten-hour endurance test in which men slogged each other to exhaustion; one in which King Edward told his men to give no quarter; and the opposing Lancastrians, with the wind against them, suffered snow and arrows blowing together into their faces.
Before the battle even began both sides were already tired and frozen after a bitter night spent in the biting wind. None the less, the fighting went on until ten o’clock at night, long after it was dark. By dusk the Lancastrian forces had been driven backwards to a deep gully of the river Cock, and many who were not hacked down were drowned as they tried to cross. It was, says the Great Chronicle of London, ‘a sore and long and unkindly fight – for there was the son against the father, the brother against brother’. Crowland talks of more than thirty-eight thousand dead; and though that is probably an exaggeration, ‘many a lady’, said Gregory’s Chronicle, lost her beloved that day.
For others, of course, the news was good. Cecily had word of the victory early, on 3 April, as William Paston wrote: ‘Please you to know such tidings as my Lady of York hath by a letter of credence under the sign manual of our sovereign lord king Edward, which letter came unto our said lady this same day … at xi clock and was seen and read by me.’ The Bishop of Elphin, as he subsequently told the Papal Legate, sets the glad tidings later:40 ‘On Easter Monday, at the vesper hour [sunset], I was in the house of the Duchess of York. Immediately after vespers the Lord Treasurer came to her with an authentic letter … On hearing the news the Duchess [returned] to the chapel with two chaplains and myself and there we said “Te Deum” after which I told her that the time was come for writing to your Lordship, of which she approved. …’
Now it was Marguerite, her husband and her son who were to flee, leaving York, where they waited for news, with only what they could carry. As Prospero di Camulio wrote: ‘Any one who reflects at all upon the wretchedness of that queen and the ruins of those killed and considers the ferocity of the country, and the state of mind of the victors, should indeed, it seems to me, pray to God for the dead and not less for the living.’
SEVEN
To Love a King
Lady Grey: Why stops my lord? Shall I not hear my task?
Edward: An easy task: ’tis but to love a king.
Henry VI Part 3, 3.2
A new regime had come in, a new ruling house held the throne, and everything had changed. But none of the protagonists could fail to be aware that Fortune’s wheel could just as easily spin in the opposite direction.
The fortunes of Marguerite of Anjou had for the present turned dramatically for the worse. After the battle of Towton she, her husband and son had fled back to Scotland where they would remain for the next year. The refugees were forced to promise the perpetually contested border town of Berwick to the Scots in return, while any further attempt to recruit French aid was temporarily thwarted by the death that summer of the French king Charles VII. His successor Louis would have to be wooed afresh. Attainted in the first parliament of November 1461 for transgressions and offences ‘against her faith and Liegance’ to King Edward, Marguerite was being destroyed as only a woman could be. In the words of a contemporary ballad:
Moreover it is a right great perversion,
A woman of a land to be a regent –
Queen Margaret I mean, that ever hath meant
To govern all England with might and power
And to destroy the right line was her intent.
Another ballad, composed a couple of years later, had Henry VI lamenting he had married a wife ‘That was the cause of all my moan’. The absent Marguerite was now everyone’s choice of villain. When the Tudor chronicler Polydore Vergil wrote later that ‘By mean of a woman, sprang up a new mischief that set all out of order’, he was casting her as another Eve. Even Edward, for whom Henry should surely have been the greatest enemy, wrote of his having been moved ‘by the malicious and subtle suggestion and enticing of the said malicious woman Margaret his wife’.
Elizabeth Woodville had certainly suffered: not just the loss of her husband John Grey, but the potential destruction of her whole family. She could no longer count on the security of a home on one of the Grey family’s Midland estates. Not only would she have to fight her mother-in-law for her dower rights, but as leading Lancastrians the Woodvilles might well have found themselves ruined when Henry and Marguerite fell.
Margaret Beaufort too had suffered, though to a lesser degree. The armed clashes that brought the Yorkists into power had killed her father-in-law the Duke of Buckingham at Northampton in 1460, and brought the position of his family into question. They had also scattered her family of birth. Her cousin Henry, the latest Duke of Somerset (son to Marguerite’s ally), had to flee abroad after Towton with his younger brothers, as did Jasper Tudor. In the autumn of 1461 Jasper followed Queen Marguerite into her Scottish exile and would spend almost a decade, there and in France, trying to rally the Lancastrian cause.
Margaret’s husband, Henry Stafford, had fought for