Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
the same intent, without suffering any other person there to hunt’. For a queen to exercise patronage and protection – to be a ‘good lady’ to her dependants – was wholly acceptable. But Marguerite was still failing in her more pressing royal duty.
In contrast to that of the prolific Yorks, the royal marriage, despite the queen’s visits to Thomas à Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, was bedevilled by the lack of children. A prayer roll of Marguerite’s, unusually dedicated to the Virgin Mary rather than to the Saviour, shows her kneeling hopefully at the Virgin’s feet, probably praying for a pregnancy. One writer had expressed, on Marguerite’s arrival in England, the Psalmist’s hope that ‘Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thy house’; and the perceived link between a fertile monarchy and a fertile land only added to the weight of responsibility. As early as 1448 a farm labourer was arrested for declaring that ‘Our Queen was none able to be Queen of England … for because that she beareth no child, and because that we have no prince in this land.’
The problem was probably with Henry, whose sexual drive was not high. The young man who famously left the room when one of his courtiers brought bare-bosomed dancing girls to entertain him may also have been swayed by a spiritual counsellor who preached the virtues of celibacy. But it was usually the woman who was blamed in such circumstances, and so it was now. A child would have aligned the queen more clearly with English interests, and perhaps removed from her the pressure of making herself felt in other, less acceptable, ways. Letters written by the king were now going out accompanied by a matching letter from the queen, and it was clear who was the more forceful personality.
Henry VI had never managed to implement his agreement to return Anjou and Maine to France, and in 1448 a French army had been despatched to take what had been promised. The following year a temporary truce was broken by a misguided piece of militarism on the part of Somerset, now (like his brother before him) England’s military commander in France and (like his brother before him) making a woeful showing in the role. The French retaliation swept into Normandy. Rouen – where York and Cecily had ruled – swiftly fell, and soon Henry V’s great conquests were but a distant memory. York would have been more than human had he not instanced this as one more example of his rival’s inadequacies, while Suffolk (now elevated to a dukedom) did not hesitate to suggest that York aspired to the throne itself. In 1449 York was sent to occupy a new post as governor of Ireland – or, as Jean de Waurin had it, ‘was expelled from court and exiled to Ireland’. Cecily went with him and there gave birth to a son, George, in Dublin. The place was known even then as a graveyard of reputations; still, given the timing, they may have been better off there in comfortable exile. English politics were becoming ever more factionalised, and some of the quarrels could be seen swirling around the head of Margaret Beaufort, only six years old though she might have been.
After her father’s death wardship of the valuable young heiress, with the right to reap the income of her lands, had been given to Suffolk – although, unusually for the English nobility, the baby was at least left in her mother’s care. Her marriage, however, was never going to be left to her mother to arrange. By 1450 she was a pawn of which her guardian had urgent necessity.
Most of the blame for the recent disasters in England’s long war with France had been heaped on Suffolk’s head (though there was enmity left over and to spare for Marguerite, whose father17 had actually been one of the commanders in the French attack). Suffolk was arrested in January 1450; immediately, to protect the position of his own family, he arranged the marriage of the six-year-old heiress Margaret to his eight-year-old son John de la Pole. Presumably in this, as in everything else, Suffolk had Queen Marguerite’s support.
The marriage of two minors, too young to give consent, and obviously unconsummated, could not be wholly binding: Margaret herself would always disregard it, speaking of her next husband as her first. None the less, it was significant enough to play its part; when, a few weeks later, the Commons accused Suffolk of corruption and incompetence, and of selling out England to the French, prominent among the charges was that he had arranged the marriage ‘presuming and pretending her [Margaret] to be next inheritable to the Crown’.
Suffolk was placed in the Tower, but appealed directly to the king. Henry, to the fury of both the Commons and the Lords, absolved him of all capital charges and sentenced him to a comparatively lenient five years’ banishment. Shakespeare has Marguerite pleading against even this punishment,18 with enough passion to cause her husband concern and to have the Earl of Warwick declare it a slander to her royal dignity. But in fact the king had already gone as far as he felt able in resisting the pressure from both peers and parliament, who would rather have seen Suffolk executed. And indeed, when at the end of April the duke finally set sail, having been granted a six-week respite to set his affairs in order, their wish was granted. Suffolk was murdered on his way into exile, his body cast ashore at Dover on 2 May.
It had been proved all too clearly that Henry VI, unlike his immediate forbears, was a king unable to control his own subjects. Similarly, Marguerite had none of the power which, a century before, had enabled Isabella of France to rule with and protect for so long her favourite and lover Mortimer. It has been said that when the news of Suffolk’s end reached the queen – broken to her by his widow, Alice Chaucer – she shut herself into her rooms at Westminster to weep for three days. In fact, king and queen were then at Leicester, which casts some doubt on the whole story – but tales of Marguerite’s excessive, compromising grief would have been met with angry credence by the ordinary people.
It was said at the time that, because Suffolk had apparently been murdered by sailors out of Kent, the king and queen planned to raze that whole county. Within weeks of his death came the populist rising led by Jack Cade, or ‘John Amend-All’ as he called himself, a colourful Yorkist sympathiser backed by three thousand mostly Kentish men. The rebels demanded an inquiry into Duke Humfrey’s death, and that the crown lands and common freedoms given away on Suffolk’s advice should all be restored. They also made particular complaint against the Duchess of Suffolk; indeed, her perceived influence may have been the reason that, the following year, parliament demanded the dismissal of the duchess from court.
By the middle of June the rebels were camped on Blackheath, just south of London. In early July they entered the city and were joined by many of the citizens. Several days of looting and riot changed that; and Cade fled to Sussex, where he was killed. But the rebellion had exposed even more cruelly than before the weakness of the government. The royal pardons offered to the rebels were declared, as was customary if in this case unlikely, to have been won from Henry by ‘the most humble and persistent supplications, prayers and requests of our most serene and beloved wife and consort the queen’.
As if the Cade rebellion were not enough, the authorities also had a stream of bad news from France with which to contend. In May the Duke of Somerset had been forced to follow the surrender of Rouen by that of Caen.
By the time Cherbourg fell, on 12 August 1450, England had, as one Paston correspondent put it, ‘not a foot of ground left in Normandy’. But Somerset’s favour with the queen survived his military disasters. It was Marguerite who protected him, on his return to London, from demands that he should be charged as a traitor; but this flamboyant partisanship was itself a potential source of scandalous rumour, despite the fact that Somerset’s wife, Eleanor Beauchamp, was also close to the queen.
In the vacuum left by Suffolk’s death two leading candidates arose to fulfil the position of the king’s chief councillor. One was indeed the Duke of Somerset, Margaret Beaufort’s uncle. The other was Cecily’s husband Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, now making a hasty unannounced return from Ireland and intensely aware of his position both as the king’s ranking male kinsman and as the progenitor of a flourishing nursery: ‘the issue that it pleased God to send me of the royal blood’, as he put it pointedly.
York’s dissatisfaction was no doubt partly personal – he had been left seriously out of pocket by his experiences abroad – but at the start of the 1450s he could be seen at the same time as heading a call for genuine reform. Six years into Marguerite’s queenship the crown of England was in a lamentable state; its finances were so bad that the Epiphany feast of 1451 had reputedly to be called off because suppliers would no longer allow the court