Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
bedecked with flowers and foliage, the ladies in their furred gowns, hawk on wrist, wearing the characteristic headdress of the time, a roll of jewelled and decorated fabric peaking down over the brow and rising behind the head. Hunting, with ‘boating on the river’, dancing and ‘meandering’ in the garden were all recreations allowed by Christine de Pizan in a day otherwise devoted to the tasks of governance (if relevant), religious duties and charity. Visiting the poor and sick, ‘touching them and gently comforting them’, as she wrote, sounds much like the work of modern royalty. ‘For the poor feel especially comforted and prefer the kind word, the visit, and the attention of the great and powerful personage over anything else.’ Letters show Marguerite asking the Archbishop of Canterbury to treat ‘a poor widow’ with ‘tenderness and favour’; and seeking alms for two other ‘poor creatures and of virtuous conversation’.
But Marguerite had been brought up to believe that queenship went beyond simple Christian charity.5 Not only did she have the example of her mother and grandmother, but her father was one of the century’s leading exponents of the chivalric tradition, obsessed with that great fantasy of the age, the Arthurian legends. Indeed, when Thomas Malory wrote his English version of the tales, the Morte d’Arthur, completed in 1470, his portrayal of Queen Guinevere may have been influenced by Marguerite. It may have been on the occasion of Marguerite’s betrothal that René organised a tournament with knights dressed up as Round Table heroes and a wooden castle named after Sir Lancelot’s Joyeuse Garde. A bound volume of Arthurian romances was presented to the bride.
René was the author not only of a widely translated book on the perfect management of the tournament, but also of the achingly romantic Livre de Coeur de L’Amour Epris. He may have illustrated it, too; and if so, it has been suggested that his figure of Hope – who repeatedly saves the hero – may have been modelled on Marguerite. Queens in the Arthurian and other legends of chivalry were not only active but sometimes ambiguous creatures. Ceremonious consorts and arbiters of behaviour, they were also capable of dramatic and sometimes destructive action: it was Guinevere who brought down Camelot.
The two visions of queenship came together in the Shrewsbury – or Talbot – Book, a wedding present to Marguerite from John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. Although one of England’s most renowned military commanders, he would not play much part in the political tussles ahead. On the illuminated title page, Henry and Marguerite are seated crowned and hand in hand, her purple mantle fastened with bands of gold and jewels, the blue background painted with gold stars. At her feet kneels Talbot, presenting his book which she graciously accepts, the faintest hint of a smile lurking under her red-gold hair. All around are exquisite depictions of the daisy, her symbol. The image is at once benign and stately, an idealised picture of monarchy – for all that the facing page, tracing Henry VI’s genealogical claim to be king of France as well as of England, hints at political controversy. An anthology of Arthurian and other romances, poems and manuals of chivalry, the book also includes Christine de Pizan’s treatise on the art of warfare and one on the art of government – a guide not only to conducting one’s emotional life but also to running a country.
Henry had had his palaces refurbished for his bride – the queen’s apartments must have fallen out of use in his minority. Marguerite employed a large household and paid them handsomely, exploiting all the financial opportunities open to a queen to enable her to do so. Regulations for a queen’s household drawn up in the year of her arrival listed sixty-six positions, including a countess as senior lady with her own staff, a chamberlain, three chaplains, three carvers, a secretary, a personal gardener, pages of the beds and of the bakery, two launderers and various squires. Less than ten years later, the council had to suggest that the size of the queen’s household should be cut down to 120. She had, however, brought no relations and few French attendants with her, something which had been a problem with previous consorts. But what at first looked like a blessing meant that she would attach herself to new English advisers, ardently and unwisely.
On the journey from France Marguerite had learned to trust her escort Suffolk – the pre-eminent noble whom the Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain called England’s ‘second king’. She never saw any reason to change her mind – or to hide her feelings. Suffolk for his part, perhaps from a mixture of genuine admiration and intelligent politics, flattered and encouraged the young queen, even writing courtly verses playing on her name, the marguerite or daisy:
For wit thee well, it is a paradise
To see this flower when it begins to spread
With colours fresh enewed, white and red.
Although by the standards of courtly love poetry these phrases were mere convention, there were inevitably those who suspected something more than a platonic relationship between the girl in her teens and the man in his late forties – and suggested that a betrayal of England’s king might be allied to betrayal of England as a country. More than a century later, the idea of a romantic liaison between Marguerite and Suffolk was still sufficiently alive that Shakespeare has Suffolk, on their first meeting in France, falling for her beauty before he learns her identity. But even Shakespeare’s Suffolk mixes self-interest with sexual attraction, hoping to rule the king through Marguerite – and in reality, the queen had become close not only to the duke but also to his wife (born Alice Chaucer, granddaughter of the poet), which surely argues against an affair.
Suffolk had not been the only noble adviser to approve the French marriage. It had also had the endorsement of Cardinal Beaufort, the king’s great-uncle and one of the men who had governed the country during his minority, who shared Suffolk’s personal regard for Marguerite. In addition she enjoyed the support of the cardinal’s Beaufort relatives (the Somerset line that were Margaret Beaufort’s family). But against the marriage had been the king’s uncle Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester; and though Gloucester was now ageing and increasingly marginalised, his was in many ways the voice of the Francophobe English people.
All too soon, within weeks of Marguerite’s arrival and coronation, the matter of England’s ceding Maine and Anjou came to a head. It was said that Henry had promised to give back the territories ‘at the request of his wife’, as one angry reporter, Dr Thomas Gascoigne, put it: ‘… that aforesaid queen of ours begged the King of England that [the lands] so be given to her father at the urging of William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and his wife who earlier had promised to request it.’ And Gascoigne’s voice was but one among many.
In a sense he was right. In a letter to her uncle the king of France in late 1445 Marguerite promised: ‘And as to the deliverance which you desire to have of the Comté of Maine, and other matters contained in your said letters, we understand that my said lord has written to you at considerable length about this: and yet herein we will do for your pleasure the best that we can do …’ A letter of Henry’s own volunteers to give up territory in Maine, at least partly because of ‘our dear and well-beloved companion the queen, who has requested us to do this many times’. Reconciliation, and encouragement to implement the peace process, was what a queen was supposed to work at. Even the pageants had said so.
Popular blame for the loss of these lands fell largely on the head of Suffolk, the official negotiator of the marriage deal; but the situation did nothing for Marguerite’s popularity. Neither did the enmity of the old Duke of Gloucester. As Polydore Vergil wrote: ‘This woman, when she perceived the king her husband to do nothing of his own head but to rule wholly by the Duke of Gloucester’s advice … determined to take upon herself that charge and, little by little, deprive the duke of that great authority which he had lest she also might be reported to have little wit who would suffer her husband, now of mature years, to be under another man’s government …’ And Christine de Pizan had urged that a wife’s task should always be to preserve ‘the honour of her husband’. But it seems also likely that Marguerite had no conception of faction as an avoidable evil, or of the idea that the monarchy in England was supposed to be above such disputes. In the French court faction was the modus operandi, and it was normal for the crown to align itself with one or another party. The difficult relationship between England and France underpinned the first years of Marguerite of Anjou’s queenship. But it also dominated the lives of the women from the English families on either side of the political divide.