Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
my lord’s invariable intention and our in this matter.’ It is notable that Henry’s letter of confirmation was shorter and feebler, and that the officer sent down to see that the royal will was done was Marguerite’s own master of jewels. But it is also true, of course, that as a woman she was only ever able to act in the name of her husband or of her tiny son.
The chronicler Polydore Vergil says that the queen (who was ‘for diligence, circumspection and speedy execution of causes, comparable to a man’) believed a plan was afoot to put the Duke of York on the throne itself: ‘Wherefore this wise woman [called] together the council to provide remedy for the disordered state of things. …’ At a meeting of the council in Coventry in the summer of 1459 York, Warwick and their adherents were indicted for their non-appearance ‘by counsel of the queen’. Nominally, of course, the council was the king’s council, and it was he who was still ruling the country. But the queen’s dominance must have made it hard for many a loyal Englishman to be sure just where his loyalties lay.
The anonymous English Chronicle declares that now was the moment when the Yorkists worked hardest to spread rumours. ‘The queen was defamed and denounced, that he that was called prince, was not her son, but a bastard gotten in adultery; wherefore she, dreading that he should not succeed his father in the crown of England, sought the alliance of all the knights and squires of Cheshire, to have their benevolence, and held open household among them.’
In the context of armed conflict Marguerite was far from negligible, but here too she could only act by proxy. One chronicle describes how it was ‘by her urging’ that the king – nominally – assembled an army. But as that army met the York/Neville forces in the autumn of 1459 at Blore Heath, Marguerite could only wait for news a few miles away. That news included the fact that Thomas, Lord Stanley, whose forces had been promised to her, had in fact held them neutral and outside the fray. It was after this battle that Marguerite reputedly told a local blacksmith to put the shoes of her horse on backwards, to disguise her tracks as she rode away. Shakespeare’s Clarence in Henry VI Part 3 mocks ‘Captain Margaret’; but in fact the inability to fight in person would be a problem of female rule even for Elizabeth I in the next century. Christine de Pizan wrote that a baroness should know the laws of arms and the tactics necessary to defend her castle against attack; her queen, however, was expected to take a more passive role. Even at the Paston level a man could be found sending his wife to preserve their claim to the house; and she ordering crossbows. But Margaret Paston was eventually to find that ‘I cannot well guide nor rule soldiers’, who did not heed her as they would a man.
Nevertheless Marguerite’s influence was powerful. When the two armies faced off outside Ludlow a fortnight or so later, one source records that the Lancastrian soldiers would fight ‘for the love they bare to the King, but more for the fear they had of the Queen, whose countenance was so fearful and whose look was so terrible that to all men against whom she took displeasure, her frowning was their undoing and her indignation their death’. On this occasion the Yorkist forces ultimately backed off from armed conflict with their monarch, and the resultant flight has come to be called the rout of Ludford Bridge.
Warwick and Salisbury fled to Calais where their family was waiting. With them went Edward, Earl of March, the eldest son of York and Cecily. York himself and his second son, Edmund, fled to Ireland. Cecily and her younger children had most likely remained at Ludlow: a comfortable castle, since the residency there of York’s two eldest sons had ensured it was full of the fifteenth-century luxuries of chimneys, window glass and privacy, but now no sanctuary. Several sources record that she and her two youngest sons were taken prisoner there but it was never likely that any personal, physical reprisal would be taken against her, a woman. One chronicle does say that while the town of Ludlow was robbed to the bare walls ‘the noble Duchess of York unmanly and cruelly was entreated31 and [de]spoiled’, but the absence of any other sign of outrage suggests that the damage was only to her property.
When a parliament held at Coventry – packed with Marguerite’s supporters, and later known as the ‘Parliament of Devils’ – attainted the Yorkist lords, Cecily went to the city on 6 December and submitted. Gregory’s Chronicle recorded that: ‘The Duchess of York came unto King Harry and submitted her unto his grace,32 and she prayed for her husband that he might come to his answer to be received unto his grace: and the king full humbly granted her grace, and to all hers that would come with her. …’ Attainder meant not only that the men were convicted of treason, but that their lands were now the property of the crown. Cecily, however, was given a grant of a thousand marks per annum – income derived from some of those confiscated lands – ‘for the relief of her and her infants who had not offended against the king’.33 Her sister-in-law the Countess of Salisbury was personally attainted;34 Cecily was not. She was placed in custody; but the custodian was her own sister Anne, Duchess of Buckingham, whose husband had declared for the queen’s side and who seems to have kept her own natal Lancastrian sympathies. It is speculated that the comparative leniency with which Cecily was treated was the result of her friendship with Queen Marguerite – though the chronicles also report that ‘she was kept full straight with many a rebuke’ from her sister – and by January 1460 she was free to move southwards again. All the same, Cecily’s fortunes seemed to be at a low ebb.
No wonder the German artist Albrecht Dürer drew Fortune so frequently and in so many different guises, blind and pregnant, wounded or weaponed: the image reflected the arbitrary and ever-changing nature of these times. The poet John Skelton would lament Edward IV himself as Fortune’s fool:
She took me by the hand and led me a dance,
And with her sugared lips on me she smiled,
But, what from her dissembled countenance,
I could not beware till I was beguiled …
At this moment, the future prominence of Cecily’s son had never looked more unlikely.
SIX
Mightiness Meets Misery
then, in a moment, see
How soon this mightiness meets misery
Henry VIII, Prologue
Even by the standards of these tumultuous years, the ups and downs of these few months were extraordinary. In the summer of 1460, Cecily’s Yorkist menfolk were back with a fresh army. At Northampton, in July, they again met the forces of the king and queen, and this time the Yorkists were able to seize the person of Henry VI and bring him back to London as their puppet or prisoner, all the while proclaiming their loyalty.
The London chronicler Gregory described Marguerite’s flight. ‘The queen, hearing this, voided unto Wales but … a servant of her own … spoiled her and robbed her, and put her so in doubt of her life and son’s life also.’ But they managed to escape. ‘And then she come to the castle of Harlech in Wales [the home of Jasper Tudor], and she had many great gifts and [was] greatly comforted, for she had need thereof …’ She had only four companions, the chronicler reports in horror (a great lady’s household might be a hundred and fifty) and she was often forced to ride pillion behind a fourteen-year-old boy.
Marguerite was not the only woman whose fortunes had changed overnight. Everything was changing, once again, for Cecily, too. In this latest battle, her brother-in-law the Duke of Buckingham had been among the casualties. While Warwick returned to Calais in triumph to fetch his family home, Cecily, with her younger children, moved to London, to await word from her husband. As Queen Marguerite fled westwards, York sent for Cecily (travelling in a chair of blue velvet,35 ‘and four pair coursers therein’) to come and meet him in Hereford, to share his triumphal progress, heralded by trumpeters and displaying the royal arms, back towards the city.
It surely says something about their relationship that he wanted her by his side, riding in victory through the green summer countryside. But in fact the very flamboyance of their entry may have worked against them. Citizens and nobles alike were pleased enough to welcome York: a steady hand to keep anarchy at bay. But when it looked as though he would claim the throne