Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
until the 1450s the Neville family had continued to support the Lancastrian government, to which they were linked by the connections of Joan Beaufort. Cecily, married to York, must have found herself isolated within her own family. This situation had now begun to change, largely because of the repercussions of a feud with another great northern family, the Percy earls of Northumberland. The two divisions of the Neville family were coming to be on opposite sides. Cecily, the former ‘Rose of Raby’, was now closest to the Nevilles of Middleham, Salisbury and Warwick, who were aligning themselves with her husband; while her half-nephew Ralph, who held the Raby land and the Westmorland title, remained Lancastrian. Whatever the cause, the change of allegiance in at least some of her kin must have been welcome to Cecily.
In May 1455 the queen and Somerset held another great council charged with protecting the king ‘against his enemies’. It is from this month that many historians date the start of the ‘Cousins’ War’. The stand-off between the two parties quickly gave way to armed conflict as the king (supported by Somerset, though not by the queen, who had retreated to Greenwich with her baby) rode out of London at the head of a royal army and York likewise mustered his forces. The battle of St Albans was no major military engagement – an hour-long fracas through the market place and the town’s main street – but it was notable for two things. Contemporaries were shocked, not only that the victorious Yorkist soldiers had looted their way through an English town, but that the king had been slightly wounded by an arrow from one of his English subjects. A number of lords and gentlemen on the royal side were slain, among them the Duke of Somerset, cut down by an axe outside the Castle Inn. Once again Marguerite had lost her great ally (and Margaret Beaufort her uncle, and the head of her family).
York’s and the Nevilles’ was the victory. But the battle of St Albans was significant in yet another way. There may have been no clear-cut turning-point in Marguerite of Anjou’s progress towards political activism, but this was surely the moment when the process was completed.25
With a few exceptions, the battlefield was not part of a lady’s experience in the fifteenth century. Some thirty years before, legend had it, Margaret’s grandmother Yolande had donned silver armour and led her troops against the English at the battle of Baugé. But though the century of Joan of Arc may have given lip service to the idea of the woman warrior, even Isabella of Castile, Katherine of Aragon’s mother, who was often pictured leading her own troops into battle, in fact confined herself to strategy and the supply of arms, planning and provisioning. Certainly most of the ladies whose husbands or sons were involved in wars would not have heard about events for days or even weeks afterwards. News travelled only at a horse’s pace; and in an age before mass media (before, even, the dissemination of official printed reports) they may never have known as much about the progress of each battle as is known today. The history of the ‘Wars of the Roses’ has usually been told in terms of the men who alone could take part in its physical conflicts. But the lives of the women behind them could be affected no less profoundly.
As the Yorkists took over the reins of government, there was no overt breach of loyalty – everything was done in the king’s name. Past wrongs were blamed on the dead Somerset and his allies. But Marguerite at least was mistrustful and unhappy, again leaving the court to take refuge in the Tower with her baby. The fact that Henry resumed his role as king almost as York’s puppet must have frightened as well as angered her. That autumn the king fell ill again, though this time only for three months, and from November 1455 to February 1456 York resumed his protectorship of the country.
But as York set about a policy of financial retrenchment, the queen was working to try and make the king’s rule more than nominal. ‘The queen is a great and strong laboured woman, for she spares no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion to her power’, wrote one observer, John Bocking, a connection of the Paston family. Early in 1456, as the king’s recovery put an end to York’s protectorship, Marguerite herself left London, taking her baby son to the traditional Lancastrian stronghold of Tutbury. She had decided to take action, rallying support and persuading the king to remove the court from London to the Midlands, where her own estates lay. In September of that year her chancellor was entrusted by the king with the Privy Seal, which gave her access to the whole administration of the country.
Marguerite portrayed herself always as the king’s subordinate and adjunct, which was what was needed in the short term but in the long term both acted to the detriment of her authority and left her vulnerable to charges of exceeding her brief. It was as Marguerite managed to accrue more power to herself that the rumours really began to circulate about her sexual morality – as if the two things were two sides of the same unnatural coin.26 It was increasingly said that the prince was not the king’s son but perhaps Somerset’s – or not even hers, but a changeling. In February 1456 one John Helton, ‘an apprentice at court’, was hanged, drawn and quartered ‘for producing bills asserting that Prince Edward was not the queen’s son’.
The pageants that welcomed Marguerite into the city of Coventry on 14 September that year reflected the confusion about her role. In most of them she was represented as traditionally female – wife and mother – and praised particularly for her ‘virtuous life’. (Considering the aspersions that had been cast on her sexual virtue, a point was being made there, if, as is possible, Marguerite herself had any hand in framing the images.) She was hailed, hopefully if inappropriately, as a ‘model of meekness, dame Margaret’ – and though the ending made a show of the famously sword-wielding and dragon-slaying St Margaret, it was not before six famous conquerors had promised to give the saint’s less well-armed namesake their protection; of which, as a female, she clearly stood in need.
But that autumn the king called a council from which (so a correspondent of the Pastons’ wrote) the Duke of York withdrew ‘in right good conceit with the king, but not in great conceit with the Queen’.
By the beginning of 1457 – with the business of appointing a council for Marguerite’s baby son, with her order of a huge stock of arms for the Midlands castle of Kenilworth – the balance of power was running in favour of the queen. And when she paid another visit to Coventry, at the insistence of her officials she was escorted back out of the city by the mayor and sheriffs with virtually the same ceremonies that would have been accorded to the king, or so the city recorder noted with shock: ‘And so they did never before the Queen till then.’ Only the parade of the king’s sword was missing.fn1But while Marguerite was acting so determinedly, others of her sex were still too young to play their role in the country’s history.
In Warwick Castle, on 11 June 1456, the Earl of Warwick’s wife Anne Beauchamp had given birth to their second daughter, Anne. Anne Beauchamp had come unexpectedly (and not without familial strife) into a vast inheritance, and since the Warwicks never produced sons her daughters Isabel and Anne Neville27 were early marked out as the greatest heiresses of their day. Anne would have a future as chequered as any in the fifteenth century – but at the moment, geographically close though they may have been to Queen Marguerite, her father and her family were prominent in the Yorkist cause. Meanwhile in far-off Wales, at Pembroke Castle, the young Lancastrian Margaret Beaufort was also about to have to take control of her own destiny.
FIVE
Captain Margaret
Where’s Captain Margaret to fence you now?
Henry VI Part 3, 2.6
In 1455, shortly after her uncle Somerset had been killed in the queen’s cause, Margaret Beaufort had reached her twelfth birthday. Until this time, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, she had probably been left in her mother’s care, but when the king’s half-brother Edmund Tudor was sent to Wales as the king’s representative late that year he would almost certainly have been able to take Margaret with him as his wife. Popular opinion would have suggested that, even though it was now legal, consummation of the marriage should be delayed – the more so since Margaret was slight and undeveloped for her age. But other factors weighed more heavily with Edmund: fathering a child on Margaret would give him a life interest in her lands; and though there was now a Lancastrian heir, there was still not a spare. She became pregnant