Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood
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Название: Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses
Автор: Sarah Gristwood
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9780007309320
isbn:
As the Yorkists took over the reins of government, there was no overt breach of loyalty – everything was done in the king’s name. Past wrongs were blamed on the dead Somerset and his allies. But Marguerite at least was mistrustful and unhappy, again leaving the court to take refuge in the Tower with her baby. The fact that Henry resumed his role as king almost as York’s puppet must have frightened as well as angered her. That autumn the king fell ill again, though this time only for three months, and from November 1455 to February 1456 York resumed his protectorship of the country.
But as York set about a policy of financial retrenchment, the queen was working to try and make the king’s rule more than nominal. ‘The queen is a great and strong laboured woman, for she spares no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion to her power’, wrote one observer, John Bocking, a connection of the Paston family. Early in 1456, as the king’s recovery put an end to York’s protectorship, Marguerite herself left London, taking her baby son to the traditional Lancastrian stronghold of Tutbury. She had decided to take action, rallying support and persuading the king to remove the court from London to the Midlands, where her own estates lay. In September of that year her chancellor was entrusted by the king with the Privy Seal, which gave her access to the whole administration of the country.
Marguerite portrayed herself always as the king’s subordinate and adjunct, which was what was needed in the short term but in the long term both acted to the detriment of her authority and left her vulnerable to charges of exceeding her brief. It was as Marguerite managed to accrue more power to herself that the rumours really began to circulate about her sexual morality – as if the two things were two sides of the same unnatural coin.26 It was increasingly said that the prince was not the king’s son but perhaps Somerset’s – or not even hers, but a changeling. In February 1456 one John Helton, ‘an apprentice at court’, was hanged, drawn and quartered ‘for producing bills asserting that Prince Edward was not the queen’s son’.
The pageants that welcomed Marguerite into the city of Coventry on 14 September that year reflected the confusion about her role. In most of them she was represented as traditionally female – wife and mother – and praised particularly for her ‘virtuous life’. (Considering the aspersions that had been cast on her sexual virtue, a point was being made there, if, as is possible, Marguerite herself had any hand in framing the images.) She was hailed, hopefully if inappropriately, as a ‘model of meekness, dame Margaret’ – and though the ending made a show of the famously sword-wielding and dragon-slaying St Margaret, it was not before six famous conquerors had promised to give the saint’s less well-armed namesake their protection; of which, as a female, she clearly stood in need.
But that autumn the king called a council from which (so a correspondent of the Pastons’ wrote) the Duke of York withdrew ‘in right good conceit with the king, but not in great conceit with the Queen’.
By the beginning of 1457 – with the business of appointing a council for Marguerite’s baby son, with her order of a huge stock of arms for the Midlands castle of Kenilworth – the balance of power was running in favour of the queen. And when she paid another visit to Coventry, at the insistence of her officials she was escorted back out of the city by the mayor and sheriffs with virtually the same ceremonies that would have been accorded to the king, or so the city recorder noted with shock: ‘And so they did never before the Queen till then.’ Only the parade of the king’s sword was missing.fn1But while Marguerite was acting so determinedly, others of her sex were still too young to play their role in the country’s history.
In Warwick Castle, on 11 June 1456, the Earl of Warwick’s wife Anne Beauchamp had given birth to their second daughter, Anne. Anne Beauchamp had come unexpectedly (and not without familial strife) into a vast inheritance, and since the Warwicks never produced sons her daughters Isabel and Anne Neville27 were early marked out as the greatest heiresses of their day. Anne would have a future as chequered as any in the fifteenth century – but at the moment, geographically close though they may have been to Queen Marguerite, her father and her family were prominent in the Yorkist cause. Meanwhile in far-off Wales, at Pembroke Castle, the young Lancastrian Margaret Beaufort was also about to have to take control of her own destiny.
FIVE
Captain Margaret
Where’s Captain Margaret to fence you now?
Henry VI Part 3, 2.6
In 1455, shortly after her uncle Somerset had been killed in the queen’s cause, Margaret Beaufort had reached her twelfth birthday. Until this time, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, she had probably been left in her mother’s care, but when the king’s half-brother Edmund Tudor was sent to Wales as the king’s representative late that year he would almost certainly have been able to take Margaret with him as his wife. Popular opinion would have suggested that, even though it was now legal, consummation of the marriage should be delayed – the more so since Margaret was slight and undeveloped for her age. But other factors weighed more heavily with Edmund: fathering a child on Margaret would give him a life interest in her lands; and though there was now a Lancastrian heir, there was still not a spare. She became pregnant in the first half of 1456, some time before her thirteenth birthday. It would at best have been an anxious time for her, but worse was to follow. Edmund did not live to see the birth of his child. Captured at Carmarthen by an ally of the Duke of York’s, he was soon released but caught plague there and died in November.
Isolated in plague-ridden Wales and heavily pregnant, a terrified Margaret had only one ally close at hand – her brother-in-law Jasper Tudor, who, himself only in his early twenties, was called to take on this quasi-paternal role. She fled to his stronghold of Pembroke and it was there that on 28 January 1457 she gave birth to a boy.
The ceremony that was supposed to surround the birth of a possible heir to the throne was described in ordinances Margaret Beaufort herself laid down in later life for the birth of her first grandchild; and though there was obviously more ritual involved in the confinement of a queen than in that of a mere great lady, the essential goals were the same. The woman went apart, some weeks before the birth, into carefully prepared rooms: ‘Her Highness’s pleasure being understood as to what chamber it may please her to be delivered in, the same to be hung with rich cloth or arras, sides, roof, windows and all, except one window, which must be hanged so that she have light when it pleases her.’ She took communion, then progressed in state to her apartments; took wine and sweetmeats with her (male) officers and then bade them farewell. As she entered her chamber she passed into a female world, where ‘women are to be made all manner of officers, butlers, sewers and pages; receiving all needful things at the chamber door’. It was meant to create a protective environment for mother and child alike – perhaps conditions as near womb-like as possible.
After the birth a new mother was not allowed outdoors until she went for her ‘churching’ or purification some forty days later, accompanied by midwives and female attendants, bearing a lighted candle, to be sprinkled with holy water. Christine de Pizan gives a description of the lying-in of a mere merchant’s wife, who arranged that awe-struck visitors should walk past an ornamental bed and a dresser ‘decorated like an altar’ with silver vessels before even reaching her own bedchamber: ‘large and handsome’, with tapestries all around, and a bed made up with cobweb-fine display sheets, and even a gold-embroidered rug ‘on which one could walk’. ‘Sitting in the bed was the woman herself, dressed in crimson silk, propped up against large pillows covered in the same silk and decorated with pearl buttons, wearing the headdress of a lady.’ But it seems likely that Margaret Beaufort’s circumstances militated against any such pleasurable feminine display.
We know that women were as anxious then as now to take any precaution they could against the perils of childbirth: from a favourite midwife СКАЧАТЬ