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It seems certain that when the king had the marriage with Suffolk’s son dissolved, he already had it in mind to marry Margaret and her fortune to Edmund, the elder of his two half-brothers. This could take place in just over two years’ time, as soon as she turned twelve and reached the age of consent. It is possible Henry envisaged this move as a step to making Edmund his heir, though of course Edmund’s own lineage gave him no shadow of a claim to the English throne. He certainly had royal blood in his veins – but it was the blood of the French royal house. Marriage might allow him to absorb Margaret’s claim to the throne of England – a claim which, of course, would be inherited by any sons of the marriage. And the fact that Henry had neither children nor royal siblings meant that even comparatively distant claims were coming into prominence.
The formal changes in her marital situation required some participation from the nine-year-old Margaret herself. She would later imagine it as a real choice and an expression of manifest destiny, praying to St Nicholas to help her choose between the two husbands; but she was essentially fooling herself. Her account of a dream vision the night before she had to give her answer was given in later life to her chaplain, John Fisher. As she lay in prayer, about four in the morning, ‘one appeared unto her arrayed like a Bishop, and naming unto her Edmund, bade take him unto her husband. And so by this means she did incline her mind unto Edmund, the King’s brother, and Earl of Richmond.’ Perhaps that ‘by this means she did incline her mind …’ is the real story – perhaps Margaret, even then, was trying to invent a scenario to mask the unpalatable fact that she would have had no choice in the matter. Or perhaps the story was only later Tudor propaganda, designed to reinforce the message that they were a divinely ordained dynasty.
FOUR
No Women’s Matters
Madam, the king is old enough himself
To give his censure. These are no women’s matters.
Henry VI Part 2, 1.3
The court party were about to get another, unexpected, boost – one that, ironically, made Margaret Beaufort’s marriage a matter of a little less urgency. That spring of 1453 the king was at long last able to announce – to his ‘most singular consolation’, as the official proclamation had it – that his ‘most dearly beloved wife the Queen [was] enceinte’.
Marguerite can have had no doubt to whom to give thanks for her pregnancy. Having already made a new year’s offering of a gold tablet with the image of an angel, bedecked with jewels, she had recently been on pilgrimage to Walsingham, where the shrine of Our Lady was believed to be particularly helpful to those trying to conceive. On the way back she had stayed a night at Hitchin in Hertfordshire with Cecily Neville, who that summer wrote to Marguerite21 praising ‘that blessed Lady to whom you late prayed, in whom aboundeth plenteously mercy and grace, by whose mediation it pleased our Lord to fulfil your right honourable body of the most precious, most joyful, and most comfortable earthly treasure that might come unto this land’.
Cecily was not writing only to congratulate Marguerite – nor even to lament the infirmity of her own ‘wretched body’. She was indeed recovering from the birth of her son Richard, of which Thomas More22 wrote that it was a breech birth and the mother could not be delivered ‘uncut’. But it was her husband’s fall from favour that caused her to be ‘replete with such immeasurable sorrow and heaviness as I doubt not will of the continuance thereof diminish and abridge my days, as it does my worldly joy and comfort’. She would have sued to Marguerite earlier had not ‘the disease and infirmity that since my said being in your highness presence hath grown and groweth’ caused her ‘sloth and discontinuance’. In this long, elaborate and convoluted letter Cecily renewed the plea she had made at Hitchin: that her husband the Duke of York should no longer be ‘estranged from the grace and benevolent favour of that most Christian, most gracious and most merciful prince, the king our sovereign lord’.
It is not known whether York had asked Cecily to intercede, or whether she did so on her own initiative. The lists of gifts made by Marguerite each year show presents being made to Cecily and her servants; this can be interpreted as a less politically coded conduit to the husband, or as an expression of female alliance. Either way, Cecily’s letter may have had some effect. When a great council was summoned that autumn York did, belatedly, receive an invitation to attend; one of the signatories on the document was Marguerite’s confessor.
The council was summoned by Margaret Beaufort’s uncle, Somerset, on 24 October. Recently, several important things had happened. On 19 October the French king’s forces had entered Bordeaux, leaving England only Calais as a foothold in France and ending the Hundred Years War with France’s resounding victory. On the 13th Queen Marguerite had given birth to a healthy baby boy, named Edward after Edward the Confessor, whose feast day it was. But while proclamations of the joyous news were read around the country, at court the joy was muted. For the man to whom the news should have been most welcome of all, the baby’s father, Henry VI, had been for some weeks in a catatonic stupor.
It had been the middle of August when the king, after complaining one evening of feeling unusually sleepy, had woken the next morning with lolling head, unable to move or to communicate with anybody. Over the days and weeks ahead, as his physicians and priests tried the full panoply of fifteenth-century remedies – bleedings, purgings and cautery on the one hand, exorcism on the other – he seemed not entirely to lose consciousness but to be utterly incapable. Modern medicine has tentatively diagnosed his condition as catatonic schizophrenia, or a depressive stupor, triggered by the news from France or just possibly by the fact of Marguerite’s pregnancy. Every effort was made at first to conceal the king’s condition, not only from the country at large but specifically from York.
It was in this climate that, as custom dictated, Marguerite had withdrawn into her apartments at Westminster to await her child’s birth; it was an all-female world which not even her priest was allowed to enter. Never can withdrawal from the wider world have seemed less timely. After the birth – and the churching or ceremony of religious purification some forty days later at which Marguerite, wearing a robe trimmed with more than five hundred sables, was attended by the duchesses not only of Suffolk and Somerset but also of York – she had to accept the fact that Henry in his catatonic state could make no sign of acknowledging the baby as his. This represented both a personal slight and a practical problem if the name of the little prince were to be invoked as nominal authority for a council to rule during his father’s incapacity.
There would, perhaps inevitably, be rumours about the baby’s paternity – whispers that Marguerite had been guilty of adultery with the Duke of Somerset. If it were indeed the news of Marguerite’s pregnancy that had triggered the king’s collapse, the question is whether he was horrified by the first indisputable evidence of his own sexuality or, conversely, by awareness that СКАЧАТЬ