Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
since his choice of a woman of lower rank seemingly proved he could not be of the blood of kings.
It is debatable just how far from suitable Elizabeth actually was. Certainly, she was not the princess a king might have been expected to marry. Her mother Jacquetta did come from the cadet branch of the Luxembourg family that gave her connections with the emperors of Germany and the kings of Bohemia. But a woman’s status came from her father, and a mother could not share her superior rank with her husband and children. That said, throughout the Middle Ages high-born women had chosen to reflect their maternal heritage, most notably in the arms displayed on their seals; and when the time came for Elizabeth’s coronation, much play would be made of her connections with European royalty. Then again, there may have been some popularity value in Elizabeth’s very Englishness after the experience with French Marguerite, and even a reconciliatory gain from the Woodville family’s attachment to the Lancastrian cause.
Another problem was Elizabeth’s widowhood. There was a strong sentiment (More and Mancini both put it higher and make it a custom) that the king’s bride should be a virgin, not a widow: even more important if she was to provide the children who would inherit the throne. Decades later Isabella of Castile was still complaining that Edward had refused her for ‘a widow of England’; and the king’s brother Clarence, said Mancini, went so far as to declare the marriage illegal for this reason. Later, another, more serious, issue would raise its head.3
Edward’s response to his mother, More says, was ‘that he knew himself out of her rule’. Playing to Cecily’s well-known religiosity, he added that, ‘marriage being a spiritual thing’, it should follow the guidance of God who had inclined these two parties ‘to love together’4 rather than be made for temporal advantage. As for Warwick, Edward added, surely he could not be so unreasonable as ‘to look that I should in choice of wife rather be ruled by his eye than by my own, as though I were a ward that were bound to marry by the appointment of a guardian’.
Edward was getting tired of his mother’s, and his mentor’s, governance. And anyway, the deed was done; in the face of mounting rumours Edward admitted as much to his council in September 1464 – even if, said Waurin, in a ‘right merry’ way that probably indicated embarrassment. Elizabeth was presented to the court on 30 September in the chapel of Reading Abbey. Led in by Edward’s brother Clarence and the Earl of Warwick for a ceremony that may have been aimed at replacing the big public wedding that was customary for a queen, she received homage offered on bended knee.
The only Englishwoman to become queen consort5 since the Norman Conquest, Elizabeth Woodville was crowned the following spring in a ceremony of great magnificence at which her mother’s royal kin were carefully given a prominent part. Edward had ordered from abroad ‘divers jewels of gold and precious stones, against the Coronation of our dear wife the Queen’; silk for her chairs and saddle; plate, a gold cup and basin at £108 5s 6d; and two cloths of gold. Other expenses show a more homely touch: the bridgemaster of London Bridge bought paint, glue, coloured paper, ‘party gold’ and ‘party silver’. Elizabeth was greeted by a pageant as she crossed the river, coming from Eltham to the south. It included six effigies of virgins with kerchiefs on their heads over wigs made of flax and dyed with saffron; and two of angels, their wings resplendent with nine hundred peacock feathers. Elizabeth made her way to the Tower, where tradition dictated she would spend the first night; next day she was carried in a horse litter to Westminster where she was to spend the night, her arrival heralded by the white and blue splendour of several dozen new-made Knights of the Bath.
Details of the coronation survive in a contemporary manuscript. Elizabeth, clad in a purple mantle, entered Westminster Hall under a canopy of cloth of gold, flanked by bishops and with a sceptre in each hand. Removing her shoes before she entered sacred ground, she walked barefoot followed by her attendants: Cecily’s sister, the dowager Duchess of Buckingham; Edward’s sisters Elizabeth and Margaret; the queen’s own mother; and more than forty other ladies of rank. As the procession moved up to the high altar the queen first knelt, and then prostrated herself, for the solemnities. She was anointed with the holy unction and escorted to her throne ‘with great reverence and solemnity’. After mass was sung, the queen processed back into the palace. This, for the queen and to a greater degree for the king, was a ceremony that not only acknowledged but actually created the sacred nature of monarchy.
Elizabeth retired into her chamber before the banquet began: a meal of three ‘courses’, each of some fifteen or twenty dishes, served with the utmost ceremony. First the queen washed in a basin held by the Duke of Clarence. For the entire duration of the meal the Duke of Suffolk (husband of the king’s sister Elizabeth) and the Earl of Essex knelt beside her. To signal each course trumpets were sounded, and a procession of mounted knights made the rounds of the great Westminster Hall. Musicians played ‘full melodiously and in most solemn wise’, and the festivities ended next day with a tournament. The king had not been present at the ceremonies, and this was an accepted tradition: the queen was always the most important person at her own coronation. But there is another whose name does not appear in the records: the king’s mother, Cecily.
It was at this time that Cecily elaborated her title of ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’6 – used by her, though more often accorded to Margaret Beaufort – into ‘Cecily, the king’s mother, and late wife unto Richard in right king of England and of France and lord of Ireland’, or, more directly, ‘Queen by Right’. Though she spent less time now at court she still kept an apartment – the ‘queen’s chambers’ – in one of the royal palaces. Rather than attempt to dispossess his mother, Edward built a new one for his wife.
According to one report – admittedly made to Elizabeth’s brother – the marriage was, broadly speaking, acceptable in the country: Marguerite, and the turmoil for which she was blamed, had put the ordinary people off foreign royalty. But a newsletter from Bruges reported differently, stating that the ‘greater part of the lords and the people in general seem very much dissatisfied’. In court circles it was certainly unwelcome. Woodville ascendancy was bound to upset both the royal family and the great magnate Warwick; the more so, since those who had shed blood for York now saw a household of Lancastrians raised to high status.
EIGHT
Fortune’s Pageant
And, being a woman, I will not be slack
To play my part in Fortune’s pageant.
Henry VI Part 2, 1.2
In April 1462 the last queen, the deposed Marguerite, had made her way from Scotland to France; a register of the city of Rouen, published in July, describes her a few months afterwards being received ‘with much honour, by the gentlemen of the King’s suite’, and lodging in the house of a Rouen lawyer. Since the previous year she had been using her old admirer Pierre de Brezé to negotiate a loan and a fleet with which to seize the Channel Islands as a bridgehead from France to England: ‘If the Queen’s intentions were discovered, her friends would unite with her enemies to kill her,’ de Brezé said. Foreseeing ‘good winnings’, the French king Louis (possibly under pressure from his mother, Marguerite’s aunt) did eventually give her aid, with Marguerite, in a gesture which would have horrified her English subjects, promising to cede him Calais in return. In the autumn of 1462 she had sailed back to Scotland, bringing forty ships and eight hundred soldiers provided by the French king and under de Brezé’s command. Collecting some Scots led by Somerset (and nominally by the deposed Henry VI), she pushed across the border into northern England where she made ‘open war’, as the Great Chronicle of London put it.
Her campaign was unsuccessful. When the Yorkist guns on England’s northern coast were trained upon her she was forced to turn tail: ‘And in a carvel, wherein was the substance of her goods, she fled; and as she sailed there came upon her such a tempest that she was fain to leave the carvel and take a fisher’s boat, and so went a-land to Berwick; and the said carvel and goods were drowned.’ Edward himself rode north to confront her; but the next spring, as Gregory’s Chronicle describes it, she was still fighting on in the north.
In