Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
of their lives often echoed each other. It tries to understand their daily reality: to see what these women saw and heard, read, smelt, even tasted. The bruised feel of velvet under the fingertip, or the silken muzzle of a hunting dog. The discomfort of furred ceremonial robes on a scorching day: a girl’s ability to lose herself in reading a romantic story.
The stamping feet of the ‘maid that came out of Spain’ and danced before Elizabeth of York, and the roughened hands of Mariona, the laundrywoman listed in Marguerite of Anjou’s accounts who kept the queen’s personal linen clean. The tales of Guinevere and Lancelot, popularised in these very years by a man who knew these women; along with the ideal of the virginal saints whose lives they studied so devotedly. To ignore these things and to focus too exclusively on the wild roller coaster of military and political events results in a distorted picture, stripped of the context of daily problems and pleasures.
The attempt to tell the story of these years through women is beset with difficulties, not least the patchy nature of the source material. To insist that the women were equal players with the men, on the same stage, is to run the risk of claiming more than the known facts can support. The profound difference between their ideas and those of the modern world must first be acknowledged; but so too, conversely, must recognisable emotions – Elizabeth of York’s frantic desire to find a place in the world, Margaret Beaufort’s obsessive love for her son. It is the only way we can imagine how it felt to be flung abruptly to the top of Fortune’s wheel and then back down again. And though the tactics of the battlefield are not the subject of this book, each one meant gain or loss for wives, daughters and mothers whose destiny would be decided, and perhaps unthinkably altered, in an arena they were not allowed even to enter.
The Tudor wives of only a few decades later have a much higher profile, and yet the stories of these earlier figures are even more dramatic. These women should be a legend, a byword. Perhaps their time is coming. The months between hardback and paperback publication of this book have seen the first distant rumbles of change – word that Philippa Gregory’s novels about the women of the Cousins’ War are to become a BBC series, and the furore of interest surrounding the question of whether the bones unearthed in a Leicester car park would prove to be those of Richard III. It seems appropriate that the answer could come through the strain of mitochondrial DNA passed down only in the female line, from Richard’s mother Cecily.
In a time not only of terror but of opportunity, the actions of the women forged in this furnace would ultimately prove to matter as much as the battlefields on which cousin fought cousin.2 Their alliances and ambitions helped get a new world under way. They were the mothers and midwives if not actually of modern England, then certainly of the Tudor dynasty.
ONE
Fatal Marriage
O peers of England, shameful is this league,
Fatal this marriage, cancelling your fame
Henry VI Part 2, 1.1
It was no way for a queen to enter her new country, unceremoniously carried ashore as though she were a piece of baggage – least of all a queen who planned to make her mark. The Cock John, the ship that brought Marguerite of Anjou across the Channel, had been blown off course and so battered by storms as to have lost both its masts. She arrived, as her new husband Henry VI put it in a letter, ‘sick of ye labour and indisposition of ye sea’. Small wonder that the Marquess of Suffolk, the English peer sent to escort her, had to carry the seasick fifteen-year-old ashore.1 The people of Portchester in Hampshire, trying gallantly to provide a royal welcome, had heaped carpets on the beach where the chilly April waves clawed and rattled at the pebbles, but Marguerite’s first shaky steps on English soil took her no further than a nearby cottage, where she fainted. From there she was carried to a local convent to be cared for.
This would be the woman whom Shakespeare, in Henry VI Part 3, famously dubbed the ‘she-wolf’ of France, her ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’. The Italian-born chronicler Polydore Vergil,2 by contrast, would look back on her as ‘imbued with a high courage above the nature of her sex … a woman of sufficient forecast, very desirous of renown, full of policy, counsel, comely behaviour, and all manly qualities’. But then Vergil was writing for the Tudor monarch Henry VII, sprung of Lancastrian stock, and he would naturally wish to praise the wife of the last Lancastrian king, the woman who had fought so hard for the Lancastrian cause. Few queens of England have so divided opinion; few have suffered more from the propaganda of their enemies.
Marguerite of Anjou was niece by marriage to the French king Charles VII, her own father, René, having been described as a man of many crowns but no kingdoms. He claimed the thrones of Naples, Sicily, Jerusalem and Hungary as well as the duchy of Anjou; titles so empty, however, that early in the 1440s he had settled in France, his brother-in-law’s territory. At the beginning of 1444 the English suggested a truce in the seemingly endless conflict between France and England known as the Hundred Years War; the arrangement would be cemented by a French bride for England’s young king, Henry VI. Unwilling to commit his own daughters, Charles had proffered Marguerite. Many royal and aristocratic marriages were made to seal a peace deal with an enemy, the youthful bride a passive potential victim. But in this case, the deal-making was particularly edgy.
In the hope of ending the long hostilities the mild-mannered Henry VI – so unfitting a son, many thought, to Henry V, the hero of Agincourt – had not only agreed to take his bride virtually without dowry but to cede the territories of Anjou and Maine, which the English had long occupied. This concession would be deeply unpopular among his subjects. Nor did the thunder and lightning that had greeted Marguerite’s arrival augur well to contemporary observers.
The new queen had been ill since setting out from Paris several weeks before. She progressed slowly towards the French coast, distributing Lenten alms and making propitiatory offerings at each church where she heard mass, dining with dignitaries and taking leave of her relations one by one along the way. But gradually, in the days after her arrival England, she recovered her health in a series of convents, amid the sounds and scents of Church ritual with all their reassuring familiarity. On 10 April 1445 at Southampton, one ‘Master Francisco, the Queen’s physician’ was paid 69s 2d ‘for divers aromatic confections, particularly and specially purchased by him, and privately made into medicine for the preservation of the health of the said lady’.
If Suffolk’s first concern had been to find medical attention for Marguerite, his second was to summon a London dressmaker to attend her before the English nobility caught sight of her shabby clothes: ‘to fetch Margaret Chamberlayne, tyre maker, to be conducted into the presence of our lady, the Queen … and for going and returning [from London to Southampton], the said Margaret Chamberlaune was paid there by gift of the Queen, on the 15th of April, 20s.’ Among the various complaints the English were preparing to make of their new queen, one would be her poverty.
Before Marguerite’s party set out towards the capital there was time for something a little more courtly, if one Italian contemporary, writing to the Duchess of Milan three years later, is to be believed. An Englishman had told him that when the queen landed in England the king had secretly taken her a letter, having first dressed himself as a squire: ‘While the queen read the letter the king took stock of her,3 saying that a woman may be seen very well when she reads a letter, and the queen never found out it was the king because she was so engrossed in reading the letter, and she never looked at the king in his squire’s dress, who remained on his knees all the time.’ It was the same trick that Henry VIII would play on Anne of Cleves almost a century later – a game from the continental tradition of chivalry.4
Henry VI, if the Milanese correspondent is to be believed, saw ‘a most handsome woman, though somewhat dark’ – and not, the Milanese tactfully assured his duchess, ‘so beautiful as your Serenity’. At the French court Marguerite had already acquitted herself well enough to win an admirer in the courtly tradition, Pierre de Brezé, to carry her colours at the joust; and to allow the Burgundian chronicler Barante to