Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
financial position had been serious a decade before Marguerite arrived in England – but it was now worse than ever. By 1450, the crown was almost £400,000 in debt.
The military campaign in France had been disastrously expensive, and the war inevitably caused disruption to trade – but the costs of maintaining the royal court were also now conspicuously far greater than the revenues available, especially under the influence of a high-spending queen;19 while there was widespread suspicion that her favourites were being allowed to feather their nests too freely. On her arrival in England parliament had voted Marguerite the income usually bestowed on queens – 10,000 marks, or some £6700; but the parlous state of her husband’s finances meant that those sums due her from the Exchequer were often not forthcoming. The surviving accounts show her making determined efforts to claim her dues, but they also show formidable expenditure – not just the £73 she gave to a Venetian merchant for luxury cloth, or the £25 to equip a Christmas ‘disguising’ at the Greenwich ‘pleasaunce’ (Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester’s former residence which Marguerite had now adopted as her own), but sums of money clearly used to reward, in cash or in kind, her allies.
The parliament of May 1451 heard a petition for York to be named heir presumptive to the childless Henry VI, and his and Cecily’s sons after him. Everything known about her would suggest that Cecily stood right alongside her husband, whose supporters were by the beginning of 1452 claiming that the king ‘was fitter for a cloister than a throne, and had in a manner deposed himself by leaving the affairs of his kingdom in the hands of a woman who merely used his name to conceal her usurpation, since, according to the laws of England, a queen consort hath no power but title only’.
The charge is to some degree substantiated by the number of grants made ‘by the advice of the council of the Queen’ as revealed in accounts of the Queen’s Wardrobe department for 1452–3; and while some have queried whether the enmity between Marguerite and York was as instinctive and as early as has popularly been supposed, there is no doubt that by this point real conflict was on the way. By February 1452 both sides were raising troops. On 2 March the two armies drew up, three miles apart, near Blackheath.
Neither party, however, was yet quite ready to fight. A royal delegation of two bishops and two earls was sent to command York, in the king’s name, to return to his allegiance. Prominent among York’s demands was that Somerset be arrested and York himself acknowledged as the king’s heir. Back in the royal camp, so one account goes, the bishops saw to it that the queen was kept occupied while they spoke to the king, who was persuaded to agree to all the demands. But the next morning there was a dramatic scene when Marguerite intercepted the guards who were leading Somerset away and instead took him to the king’s tent so that York, arriving a few minutes later to make his peace with his monarch, found himself also confronting a furious queen. Somerset was clearly in as much favour as ever; York felt he had been fooled. He had no option, however, but to make a humiliating public pledge of his loyalty before being allowed to withdraw to his estates in Ludlow. Armed conflict had been averted for the moment, but the divisions in the English nobility were deeper than ever. The resentful York and his adherents remained a threat for a king and a court party anxious to strengthen their position in any possible way; and one of the ways most favoured by the age was marriage. In February 1453 Margaret Beaufort’s mother was commanded to bring her nine-year-old daughter – Somerset’s niece – to court.
During the first years of Marguerite’s queenship Margaret had been raised at her own family seat of Bletsoe,20 as well as at Maxey in the Fens. Her mother had remarried, and there is evidence from her later life both that Margaret developed an enduring closeness to her five St John half-siblings and that she shared several of her mother’s traits: piety, a love of learning, and a desire for money and property. On 23 April 1453, she and her mother attended the annual celebration to honour the Knights of the Garter that marked St George’s Day; on 12 May the king put through a generous payment of 100 marks for the ‘arrayment’ of his ‘right dear and well beloved cousin Margaret’. But Margaret Beaufort had not been invited to court just for a party. The king had decided both to dissolve her marriage to Suffolk’s son, and to transfer her wardship to two new guardians: his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor. These were the sons of Henry’s mother, Katherine de Valois, by her second, secret, alliance with a young Welshman in her service, the lowly Owen Tudor – or ‘Tydder’, as enemies spelt it slightingly. More to the point, they were half-brothers whom the still childless Henry had begun to favour.
It seems certain that when the king had the marriage with Suffolk’s son dissolved, he already had it in mind to marry Margaret and her fortune to Edmund, the elder of his two half-brothers. This could take place in just over two years’ time, as soon as she turned twelve and reached the age of consent. It is possible Henry envisaged this move as a step to making Edmund his heir, though of course Edmund’s own lineage gave him no shadow of a claim to the English throne. He certainly had royal blood in his veins – but it was the blood of the French royal house. Marriage might allow him to absorb Margaret’s claim to the throne of England – a claim which, of course, would be inherited by any sons of the marriage. And the fact that Henry had neither children nor royal siblings meant that even comparatively distant claims were coming into prominence.
The formal changes in her marital situation required some participation from the nine-year-old Margaret herself. She would later imagine it as a real choice and an expression of manifest destiny, praying to St Nicholas to help her choose between the two husbands; but she was essentially fooling herself. Her account of a dream vision the night before she had to give her answer was given in later life to her chaplain, John Fisher. As she lay in prayer, about four in the morning, ‘one appeared unto her arrayed like a Bishop, and naming unto her Edmund, bade take him unto her husband. And so by this means she did incline her mind unto Edmund, the King’s brother, and Earl of Richmond.’ Perhaps that ‘by this means she did incline her mind …’ is the real story – perhaps Margaret, even then, was trying to invent a scenario to mask the unpalatable fact that she would have had no choice in the matter. Or perhaps the story was only later Tudor propaganda, designed to reinforce the message that they were a divinely ordained dynasty.
FOUR
No Women’s Matters
Madam, the king is old enough himself
To give his censure. These are no women’s matters.
Henry VI Part 2, 1.3
The court party were about to get another, unexpected, boost – one that, ironically, made Margaret Beaufort’s marriage a matter of a little less urgency. That spring of 1453 the king was at long last able to announce – to his ‘most singular consolation’, as the official proclamation had it – that his ‘most dearly beloved wife the Queen [was] enceinte’.
Marguerite can have had no doubt to whom to give thanks for her pregnancy. Having already made a new year’s offering of a gold tablet with the image of an angel, bedecked with jewels, she had recently been on pilgrimage to Walsingham, where the shrine of Our Lady was believed to be particularly helpful to those trying to conceive. On the way back she had stayed a night at Hitchin in Hertfordshire with Cecily Neville, who that summer wrote to Marguerite21 praising ‘that blessed Lady to whom you late prayed, in whom aboundeth plenteously mercy and grace, by whose mediation it pleased our Lord to fulfil your right honourable body of the most precious, most joyful, and most comfortable earthly treasure that might come unto this land’.
Cecily was not writing only to congratulate Marguerite – nor even to lament the infirmity of her own ‘wretched body’. She was indeed recovering from the birth of her son Richard, of which Thomas More22 wrote that it was a breech birth and the mother could not be delivered ‘uncut’. But it was her husband’s fall from favour that caused her to be ‘replete with such immeasurable sorrow and heaviness as I doubt not will of the continuance thereof diminish and abridge my days, as it does my worldly joy and comfort’. She would have sued to Marguerite earlier had not ‘the disease and infirmity that since my said being in your highness presence hath grown and groweth’ caused her ‘sloth and discontinuance’.