Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
couple were able to establish themselves in the castle of Bourne in the Fen country, part of Margaret’s inheritance from her grandmother. The wardship of the four-year-old Henry Tudor was another matter. He was no threat to Edward (or rather, with Henry VI and his son both living, he was not the greatest threat), but he and his lands did present an opportunity.
The boy’s lands were transferred to the Duke of Clarence and his wardship handed to the devoted Yorkist Sir William Herbert, the man who had once seized Carmarthen Castle and taken Edmund Tudor into custody. For several years this arrangement seemed a comparatively happy one: Henry, visited by Margaret and her husband, was raised with every advantage as one of Herbert’s own family – which, with several young daughters to marry off, they may have planned he would one day become.
As for Cecily Neville, it must have been hard for her to work out where Fortune’s wheel had left her. The loss of her husband and her second son, a shattering personal grief, was only weeks behind her; but now another son, her eldest, sat on the throne, opening up a world of possibilities. As Edward set out north again, it was his mother whom he commended to the burghers of London as his representative. The Bishop of Elphin concluded his letter about Cecily’s reception of the battlefield news by urging the Papal Legate: ‘As soon as you can, write to the King, the Chancellor, and other Lords, as I see they wish it; also to the Duchess, who is partial to you, and [holds] the king at her pleasure.’ In the early days of Edward IV’s reign, perhaps the bishop was not the only one to consider that Cecily could rule her son as she wished. Edward granted to her the lands held by his father1 and further subsidised her ever-lavish expenditure. She regarded herself as queen dowager, and played the part. Edward must, after all, have been aware that he had come to the throne by the efforts of her relations, and he was young enough for everyone – perhaps even including his mother – to underestimate his capabilities.fn3
Cecily’s youngest daughter – fourteen-year-old Margaret of Burgundy, as she would become – was now installed at Greenwich, the luxurious riverside ‘pleasaunce’ that had been remodelled by Henry VI’s uncle Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester. Her two older sisters were already established elsewhere. Anne, the Yorks’ eldest child, had been matched in 1445 when she was six with Henry Holland, son of the great Duke of Exeter who, however, was committed to the Lancastrian cause. By the time she reached adulthood the couple were estranged2 to the point where Anne notoriously found consolation elsewhere, with a Kent gentleman called Thomas St Leger. The next sister, Elizabeth, had recently been married to John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk (who, as a child, had nominally been married to Margaret Beaufort). John’s father had been the great minister of Henry VI murdered in 1450; his mother the duchess was the mighty Alice Chaucer, a natural Lancastrian who, however, doubtless saw this Yorkist alliance as being in the interests of her family’s safety. Elizabeth quickly began to produce a string of children – at least five sons and four daughters – and with her husband converted to the Yorkist side her future looked uncontroversial, the more so since John showed no aptitude for nor interest in active political office. But Margaret, two years younger than Elizabeth, was, crucially, still unmarried when her brother Edward came to the throne – and available to be offered in marriage as England’s princess.
Under the former regime, Greenwich had been used by Queen Marguerite, who had decorated it with her daisy emblem and added new windows, a great chamber, an arbour in the gardens and a gallery overlooking them. The daisies were equally fitting for this other Margaret. The whole family would come to use Greenwich regularly, but for the moment Edward seized on it primarily as a suitable and healthy residence for his three youngest siblings, and Margaret’s closeness to her brothers Richard and George would play an important part in English affairs through into the Tudor period.
Here Margaret, described by the chronicler Jean de Haynin as notably tall ‘like her brother Edward’ and having ‘an air of intelligence and wit’, would have continued her education. A well-to-do girl’s training in the fifteenth century usually centred on the religious and the practical – reading, in case she had to take over business responsibilities; some knowledge of arithmetic; and an understanding of household and estate management that might extend to a little property law. The technical skill of writing was rarer: even Margaret’s adult signature was rough and unformed. And though a girl might be expected to read the psalms in Latin from an early age, to be able to write the language was so unusual that even the learned Margaret Beaufort, says her confessor Fisher, had later to regret that she had not been taught to do so.
But perhaps this York Margaret benefited to some degree from being brought up with her brothers and their tutors. In later life her own books would be in French – which language she obviously was taught – and her collection of books (at least twenty-five, an impressive number for a woman), together with her habit of giving and receiving them as gifts, demonstrates considerable literary interest. Caxton would later – tactfully, but presumably also truthfully – acknowledge her help in correcting his written English. It was under her auspices that he published the first book to be printed in English, a translation from French of the tales of Troy, and he wrote of how she had ‘found a defaut in my English which she commanded me to amend’. Those books that Margaret later owned would be wonderfully illuminated in the lively contemporary style with flowers and fruit, animals and birds. Perhaps she got a full measure of enjoyment out of the gardens at Greenwich, but perhaps, too, the spirit of Duke Humfrey, a famed bibliophile, lingered on.
Margaret’s pronounced religiosity may have come from her mother, but although in later life she would give particular support to the practical orders of religion, and had as ardent a passion for relics of the saints as any other medieval lady, she seems to have had a more intellectual interest in the subject than Cecily Neville did. If there were to be a darker, almost hysterical, element in her religious faith, perhaps it only shows that the travails of her family, at her most impressionable age, had not left her untouched.
Anne Neville’s father the Earl of Warwick was now the man most thought to be the real power behind the throne; though in fact there is much to suggest that, from Warwick’s viewpoint, Edward found his own feet much too quickly. The commons ‘love and adore [Edward] as if he were their god’, wrote one Italian observer. All the same, Warwick, having helped the new king to his throne, was riding high, restless and busy. Meanwhile his wife and daughters probably spent some of their time at the great northern stronghold of Middleham, at the court and on the countess’s own family estates in the West Midlands; a countess had her own household, distinct from her husband’s, but this female-led world was not recorded as extensively.
Not that Anne’s world was always female. Edward’s younger brother Richard spent three years being brought up in Warwick’s household; and in 1465 he and Anne were recorded as being at the feast to celebrate the enthronement of Anne’s uncle George Neville as Archbishop of York. By this point it would have been evident that the nine-year-old Anne would be a significant heiress, whether or not the thirteen-year-old Richard was mature enough to take note. The continental chronicler Waurin recorded that even now Warwick contemplated marrying his daughters to the king’s two brothers. Marriage was in the air for others, too. The young King Edward was about to make a choice based (most unusually for the times) on ‘blind affection’, as Polydore Vergil describes it disapprovingly.
The story of how Elizabeth Woodville is supposed to have originally met Edward IV is one of the best known from history. But very little is known for certain about Elizabeth’s life before she made her royal match because no one was watching. Where fact was absent, fiction rushed in.
The sixteenth-century chronicler Hall had Edward hunting in the forest of Wychwood near Grafton, in Northamptonshire, and coming to the Woodville home for refreshment. Other traditions say Whittlebury Forest, where an oak was long celebrated for the legend that Elizabeth had stood under it – bearing her petition to be granted the lands owed to her under the terms of her dowry, and accompanied by the pleading figures of the two little boys she had borne her dead husband – in order to catch the king’s attention as he rode by. Either way Elizabeth, Hall said, ‘found such grace in the King’s eyes that he not only favoured her suit, but much more fantasised her person. … For she was a woman … of such beauty and favour that with her sober demeanour, lovely looking and feminine smiling (neither too wanton nor too humble) beside her