Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Sarah Gristwood

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СКАЧАТЬ enjoyed, but liberated for the first time to act openly on her own initiative. The Yorkist lords, according to Gregory’s Chronicle, tried to lure Marguerite back to London with faked messages from her husband, ‘for they knew well that all the workings that were done grew by her, for she was more wittier than the king …’.

      As the Duke of York moved north to meet the impending Lancastrian threat, Marguerite’s name was being invoked by friends and enemies alike – even before she was ready to leave Scotland. York, holed up in his own Sandal Castle, was advised (says the Tudor writer Hall, whose grandfather had been the adviser concerned) not to sally out, but answered it would be dishonour to do so ‘for dread of a scolding woman, whose only weapons are her tongue and her nails’. The Lancastrian herald, trying to provoke York into taking a dangerous offensive, sneered that he should allow himself ‘to be tamely braved by a woman’.

      York should have heeded all the warnings. For now, once again, it would be Cecily’s turn to drink a bitter cup. No wonder she, like Margaret Beaufort, would remember the image of Fortune’s wheel; and would, perhaps ironically, bequeath a bed decorated with that image to the Tudor dynasty. In the words of an anonymous poem:

      I have see fall to men of high nobleness –

      First wealth, and then again distress,

      Now up, now down, as fortune turneth her wheel

      On December 30 the royal forces (under the command of the third Duke of Somerset, Margaret Beaufort’s cousin, who shared his father’s and uncle’s strong Lancastrian loyalty) met the Yorkists at the battle of Wakefield. The Yorkists were defeated; and casualties of the rout included York himself, pulled from his horse in the thick of the fray and his seventeen-year-old son Edmund, with whose death Shakespeare would make such play. Salisbury (whose son had also died) was killed the next day. Their heads were set on spikes on the gates of York city, the duke’s capped with a paper crown. Tudor chroniclers like Hall and Holinshed,³⁶ followed by Shakespeare, had the heads presented to a savagely vengeful Marguerite. But in fact Marguerite left Scotland only after news of the victory, travelling southwards in an outfit of black and silver lent to her by the Scottish queen Mary.

      Cecily had lost a husband, a son, a brother, and a nephew. The news must have reached her and her three youngest children in London, probably at Baynard’s Castle, with the taste of the Christmas feasts still in their mouths. A great house like Baynard’s Castle with its gardens and terraces, its great hall and its courtyards capable of holding the four hundred armed men the Duke had once brought with him from Ireland, must have seemed a place of refuge in a treacherously shifting world. But the Duke of York’s death brought to an end a long and in many ways happy union. It had also narrowly deprived Cecily of her chance of being queen, and she would not forget it easily.

      Marguerite’s party were once more in the ascendant. As the queen came south with her forces, some time in January or early February 1461, she sent letters – one on her own behalf, and one in the name of her young son – to the authorities of London, demanding the city’s loyalty. The one from the seven-year-old prince presents him as the active avenger, heading his army, and mentions his mother only as a potential victim. Marguerite’s own letter is obliged to suggest that she is acting in tandem with her young son; but it does present her forcefully: ‘Praying you, on our most hearty and desirous wise, that [above] all earthly things you will diligently intend [attend] to the surety of my lord’s royal person in the mean time; so that through malice of his said enemy he be no more troubled, vexed, or jeoparded. And, by so doing, we shall be unto you such a lady as of reason you shall largely be content.’

      As her army swept ever southwards, her troops pillaged the land³⁷ and, unable to pay them, she did nothing to prevent it. Their actions did much to sour her subsequent reputation, besides providing fuel for Yorkist propaganda that implicitly linked this catastrophic ‘misrule’ with the parallel reversal of right order represented by a woman’s leadership.

      After the second battle of St Albans, on 17 February 1461, the reports were full of mentions of the queen or the queen’s party. One source, the Milanese ambassador in France, Prospero di Camulio, seems even to suggest that this time she was in the thick of the fray: ‘The earl of Warwick decided to quit the field, and … pushed through right into Albano [St Albans], where the queen was with 30,000 men.’ The chronicler Gregory wrote that in the midst of the battle ‘King Harry went to his queen and forsook all his lords, and trusted better to her party than to his own. …’ One anecdotal report of a speech Marguerite once made to her men is as heroic in its way as Elizabeth I’s at Tilbury: ‘I have often broken [the English] battle line. I have mowed down ranks far more stubborn than theirs are now. You who once followed a peasant girl [Joan of Arc] now follow a queen … I will either conquer or be conquered with you.’

      Marguerite had by now experienced far more warfare than most ladies of her time. She had known the tension beforehand, mounting to fever pitch; the fear that each step of your horse’s hoof could bring it down on the sharp point of a hidden caltrop, before men rushed out from ambush to claim you as their prey; and the roads afterwards, crammed with the bodies of horses and with bleeding, dying men who lacked even the strength to crawl away.

      When the engagement at St Albans was over King Henry, brought there by Warwick under guard, was found seated under an oak tree, and Marguerite was reunited with her husband. As the couple halted outside London the city officials requested that a carefully chosen delegation of ladies should act in the traditional way as go-betweens, interceding with Marguerite ‘for to be benevolent and owe goodwill to the city’. The ladies were Ismanie, Lady Scales³⁸ who had been among those escorting Marguerite from France and who had remained in her household; the widowed Duchess of Buckingham, Cecily of York’s sister, whose husband had been killed the previous summer fighting in the Lancastrian cause; and Jacquetta, dowager Duchess of Bedford, another member of the party that had escorted Marguerite to England. Of the princely house of Luxembourg, and married in her youth to Henry VI’s uncle John, Jacquetta had been widowed in 1435 at the age of nineteen; ‘minding also to marry rather for pleasure than for honour, without counsel of her friends’ she had promptly taken as her second husband ‘a lusty knight, Sir Richard Woodville’. Jacquetta had remained close to the queen; and indeed her eldest daughter Elizabeth³⁹ may have been one of Marguerite’s ladies. Now not only was Jacquetta’s own husband with the queen’s force, but so too had been her daughter’s husband John Grey, father of her two young sons. Grey had recently died at the second battle of St Albans; and it was Elizabeth Woodville’s widowhood that would soon propel her into national history.

      A letter reported that the delegation had returned to London on 20 February with news that ‘the king and queen had no mind to pillage the chief city and chamber of their realm, and so they promised; but at the same time they did not mean that they would not punish the evildoers’. The message was sufficiently ambiguous that there was still panic in the streets, and the ladies were sent out again two days later to request the Lancastrian leaders to enter the city without the main body of their army. The queen conceded; ironically, her decision to send only a small symbolic force into London, and her subsequent withdrawal to Dunstable, would prove to be arguably the biggest mistake of her life. The wheel was about to turn yet again.

      The huge overturns of fortune did not come heralded in any way. In the weeks after the battle of Wakefield, Cecily Neville had been so afraid that she had sent her two younger sons, George and Richard, abroad to the safety of Burgundy. Yet almost as she did so her eldest son Edward and the Earl of Warwick, with their armies, were preparing to approach London from the west. On 27 February they were welcomed into the city, where Edward went to his mother’s house of Baynard’s Castle.

      This time there was no talk of loyalty to King Henry – or of wishing only to rid him of his evil counsellors. On 1 March the Bishop of Exeter, Warwick’s brother, asked the eager Londoners whether they felt that Henry deserved to rule, ‘whereunto’, СКАЧАТЬ