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

ELIZABETH: the name borne by Elizabeth Woodville (1437–92), queen to Edward IV, and by their daughter Elizabeth of York (1466–1503), who would marry Henry VII. It was also the name borne by Edward IV’s sister (1444–1503), who became Duchess of Suffolk.

GEORGE: see Clarence, above.

GLOUCESTER, RICHARD, DUKE OF: the title borne in early adulthood by the future Richard III.

HENRY: the name borne by successive Lancastrian and later Tudor kings; Henry V (1387–1422), Henry VI (1421–71), Henry VII (‘Henry Tudor’, 1457–1509) and Henry VIII (1491–1547).

ISABEL NEVILLE (1451–76): daughter to the Earl of Warwick and elder sister to Anne Neville, wife to George, Duke of Clarence.

JACQUETTA WOODVILLE (1415?–72): born Jacquetta of Luxembourg, mother of Elizabeth Woodville, wife to Sir Richard Woodville, subsequently created Earl Rivers. She had previously, by her first marriage, been Duchess of Bedford.

KATHERINE: the name borne by one of Edward IV’s daughters, and also given to Katherine Gordon, wife to the pretender Perkin Warbeck. Also Katherine (or Catherine) of Aragon (1485–1536): daughter of the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile, she was brought to England to marry Arthur, son to Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. She subsequently became the first wife of Arthur’s brother Henry VIII.

LANCASTER: the name of one of the two great rival houses, the other being York, sometimes identified by the symbol of the red rose.

MARGARET: besides Margaret Beaufort, the name was borne by Margaret (or Marguerite) of Anjou (1430–82), queen to Henry VI and mother to Edward of Lancaster. Margaret (Margaret ‘of Burgundy’ or ‘of York’, 1446–1503) was also the name of the youngest daughter of Cecily Neville and Richard, Duke of York, sister to Edward IV and Richard III, who was married to Charles, Duke of Burgundy. Yet another Margaret was Margaret Tudor (1489–1541), eldest daughter of Elizabeth of York and Henry VII, who was married to the king of Scots.

MARY: the younger daughter of Henry VII and Elizabeth of York was Mary Tudor (1495/6–1533), who would be married to the king of France. The name also belonged to Mary of York (1467–82), one of Elizabeth of York’s sisters, as well as to Mary of Burgundy.

NEVILLE: name of the great northern family to which Cecily and Anne both belonged, Anne’s father Warwick being the son of Cecily’s brother, Salisbury. The Neville family was a particularly extensive one, not all of whose members would necessarily be on the same side.

PASTON: name of the Norfolk gentry family whose letters, down the generations, provide an invaluable background to this period.

RICHARD: name borne by Richard, Duke of York (1411–60); by his youngest son Richard III (1452–85); and by the younger of the two ‘Princes in the Tower’ (1473–83?).

SOMERSET, DUKES OF: John Beaufort, Earl (later first Duke) of Somerset (1404–44) was Margaret Beaufort’s father. He was succeeded by his brother Edmund Beaufort, second Duke of Somerset (1405–55), who in turn was succeeded by his son Henry, the third duke (1436–64). When Henry was executed his younger brother, another Edmund (1439–71), assumed the title of fourth duke, although it was never formally granted to him.

STAFFORD, SIR HENRY (1425?–71): second husband of Margaret Beaufort, a son to the Duke of Buckingham.

STANLEY, THOMAS, LORD STANLEY, EARL OF DERBY (1435?–1504): third husband of Margaret Beaufort and a powerful magnate.

SUFFOLK, WILLIAM DE LA POLE, DUKE OF (1396–1450): favourite minister of Henry VI and Marguerite of Anjou. He was married to Alice Chaucer (1404–75), a granddaughter of the poet Chaucer. William was succeeded by his son John (1442–91) who, despite the family’s Lancastrian affiliations, was married to Elizabeth, sister to Edward IV and Richard III, daughter of Richard, Duke of York and Cecily Neville.

TUDOR: the family name of Henry VII, of his father Edmund (1428–56) and his uncle Jasper (1431–95). The Welsh Tudors were a comparatively obscure family until Edmund’s father Owen (1400–61) became the second husband of Henry V’s widow.

WARWICK, RICHARD NEVILLE, EARL OF (1428–71): known as the ‘Kingmaker’ for the prominent role he played in placing the house of York on what had previously been a Lancastrian throne. He was the father of Isabel and Anne Neville, both of whom he married to York brothers.

WOODVILLE (or Wydeville): the birth family of Elizabeth Woodville, Edward IV’s queen. Notable among her numerous siblings was her eldest brother Anthony (1440?–83), who became Earl Rivers on his father’s death.

YORK: (as in Richard, Duke of, above). The second of the two great warring families, often identified by the symbol of a white rose.

Of the seven women whose stories I explore, the fashions of the times mean that two are called Elizabeth and three, Margaret. I have therefore referred to the York princess who married the Burgundian ruler as Margaret ‘of Burgundy’, while giving Margaret of Anjou the French appellation she herself continued sometimes to use after marriage – Marguerite. The family originally spelt as ‘Wydeville’ has been given its more familiar appellation of ‘Woodville’, and other spellings and forms have sometimes been modernised. The quotations at the top of each chapter have been drawn from Shakespeare’s history plays.

REIGNS

PROLOGUE

February 1503

She had died on her thirty-seventh birthday and that figure would be reiterated through the ceremony. Thirty-seven virgins dressed in white linen, and wreathed in the Tudor colours of green and white, were stationed in Cheapside holding burning tapers; thirty-seven palls of rich cloth were draped beside the corpse. The king’s orders specified that two hundred poor people in the vast and solemn procession from the Tower of London to Westminster should each carry a ‘weighty torch’, the flames flickering wanly in the February day.

For Elizabeth of York had been one of London’s own. Her mother Elizabeth Woodville had been the first English-born queen consort for more than three centuries, but where Elizabeth Woodville had been in some ways a figure of scandal, her daughter was less controversial. She had been a domestic queen, who gave money in return for presents of apples and woodcocks; and bought silk ribbons for her girdles, while thriftily she had repairs made to a velvet gown. Elizabeth rewarded her son’s schoolmaster, bought household hardware for her newly married daughter, and tried to keep an eye out for her sisters and their families. The trappings of the hearse showed she was a queen who had died in childbirth, a fate feared by almost every woman in the fifteenth century.

She had been, too, a significant queen: the white rose of York who had married red Lancaster in the person of Henry VII and ended the battles over the crown. Double Tudor roses, their red petals firmly encircling the white, were engraved and carved all over the chapel where she would finally be laid to rest.

The records describe how on her death Henry ‘took with him certain of his secretest, and privately departed to a solitary place to pass his sorrows and would no man should resort to him but such his Grace appointed’; leaving behind orders ‘for 636 whole masses’ to be said. ‘Also then were rung the bells of London every one, and after that throughout the Realm with solemn dirges and Masses of Requiems and every Religious place, colleges, and Churches.’ The loss of his queen was ‘as heavy and dolorous to the King’s Highness as hath been seen or heard of’. It was the end of the partnership which had given birth to the Tudor dynasty.

Elizabeth had been at the Tower when she ‘travailed of child suddenly’ and was there delivered on Candlemas Day of a baby daughter who may have come prematurely. The records of her own Privy Purse expenses show boatmen, guides, horses sent suddenly to summon a doctor from the country; linen purchased to swaddle a new baby who would outlive her mother only by days. ‘And upon the 11th day of the said month being Saturday in the morning, died the most gracious and virtuous princess the Queen, where within the parish church of the foresaid Tower her corpse lay 11 days after.’

Mourning garments were hastily ordered for her ladies, and while these were being prepared they put on their ‘most sad and simplest’ clothes. Elizabeth’s body would, immediately after death, have been disembowelled; prepared with spices, balm and rosewater; tight wrapped in waxed cloth. ‘60 ells of Holland cloth … likewise gums, balms, spices, sweet wine, and wax, with which being cered, the king’s plumber closed her in lead’, before the body was placed in a wooden chest, covered in black and white velvet with a cross of white damask. On the Sunday night the body was ready for removal to the chapel. The queen’s sister Lady Katherine Courtenay acted as chief mourner at the requiem mass, a ritual repeated daily as long as the body lay in the Tower.

It was Wednesday 22 February when the coffin was placed on a bier covered in black velvet and drawn by six horses, themselves decked in black. The cushions of black velvet and blue cloth of gold must have helped secure the coffin in place, and helped the gentleman ushers who knelt, braced against the horses’ motion, at either end of the moving construction. Above the coffin was an effigy of the queen, clothed in ‘the very Robes of Estate’, with her hair about her shoulders and her sceptre in her right hand. The funeral effigy of a royal personage symbolised the dual nature of a king or queen; the immortal office and the mortal body.

The banners at the corners of the bier were painted on a white background, to show this was the funeral of a woman who died in childbed, while behind the bier came the ladies of honour, each mounted on a palfrey; the chariots bearing other senior ladies; a throng of servants and citizens of London. In front of the bier went the choirs, and the English and foreign male dignitaries. Companies of foreign merchants – French, Spanish, Venetian – bearing their country’s arms stood among the crafts guilds and fellowships of London who held thousands of torches along the way. Bells rang, choirs sang, and incense scented the cold air from each parish church as the body passed by. From the Tower to Temple Bar; to Charing Cross and then on to Westminster; the same route that had been taken for Elizabeth’s coronation.

In the churchyard of St Margaret’s, where the peers ‘took their mantles’, the body was once again censed and then borne into the Abbey shoulder high. There it rested while, after the service, the Dirige, conducted by the abbot and nine bishops, Lady Katherine, escorted by her nephew the Marquess of Dorset and by the Earl of Derby, led the lords and the ladies to a supper of fish in the Queen’s Great Chamber. Watched that night by her ladies and men of all ranks, lit by hundreds more heavy tapers, Elizabeth’s corpse waited for the next day. Body and soul could not be left unprotected through the dark night hours: each one of those tapers might serve to drive a demon away.

The long list of services offered for the dead woman reflects the importance of the church rites in the daily life of the fifteenth century. Lauds were said at six the next morning, followed by Our Lady’s Mass at seven; the Mass of the Trinity; and then the Requiem Mass. As the ceremony came towards its close the mourners, in order of precedence, laid lengths of rich fabric across the effigy. The blue and green, the bright strands of metal in the weave, must have stood out against the funereal scene. After the sermon the ladies left, for men to do the real physical work of burial. The queen’s chamberlain and ushers broke their staves of office and cast them into the grave with ritual tears, in token that their service to Elizabeth of York was ended. Perhaps the emotion was real – Elizabeth had been a gentle mistress, and loyal to those who served her and family.

Following the funeral alms were given to ‘bed-rid folks, lazars, blind folks’; to churches, to hospitals, to charitable foundations. And, with more than 9000 yards of black cloth coming out of the Great Wardrobe, King Henry had handed out ‘the greatest livery of black gowns that ever was seen in our day’. Her funeral had cost some £3000; twice that of her father, and five times that of her eldest son. Henry must indeed have loved Elizabeth, even though in the political sphere his concern had been to avoid any suggestion that it was from her bloodline that he derived his legitimacy.

The funeral had been – as was customary for a female corpse – a predominantly female ceremony; partly because the one mourned was a woman; partly because concern for the dead was always firstly a female duty. But Elizabeth’s mother-in-law, Lady Margaret Beaufort, was absent. Instead, she occupied herself in laying down a set of ordinances for royal mourning to be used for future deaths – costume and comportment, prescribed precisely, ‘apparel for princesses and great estates’, moving down the scale in their order. A queen was to wear a surcoat with a train before and behind; the king’s mother (though Margaret was technically only a countess) was ‘to wear in every thing like to the queen’. It was often said that Margaret’s concern for rank and dominance came between her and Elizabeth; if so, they were not the only mother-in-law and daughter-in-law in this story to have had problems.

Elizabeth Woodville – the beautiful widow who had captured the heart of King Edward IV – had been bitterly resented by Edward’s mother Cecily Neville. Cecily had been the matriarch of the Yorkist clan, mother also to Richard III; just as Margaret Beaufort was a leader of the Lancastrians – another mother of kings who could never quite forget that Fortune had snatched her own queen’s crown away. Cecily’s daughter Margaret, too, was living in Burgundy, but as the sister of two Yorkist monarchs she never lost her urge to take a hand in the affairs of England.

Poor Anne Neville, Richard III’s wife, had been too shadowy a figure to have quarrelled with her mother-in-law. But the final woman in this story had quarrelled with half the world – Marguerite of Anjou, Henry VI’s wife, the Lancastrian queen under whose determined rule the ‘Wars of the Roses’, the Cousins’ War, had first got under way.

The events that caused the Cousins’ War, and finally brought into being the Tudor dynasty, were above all a family saga – ‘a drama in a princely house’. And the circle of women behind the conflicts and resolutions of the late fifteenth century were locked into a web of loyalty and betrayal as intimate and emotional as that of any other domestic drama, albeit that in this a kingdom was at stake.

The business of their lives was power; their sons and husbands the currency; the stark events of these times worthy of Greek tragedy. Cecily Neville had to come to terms with the fact that her son Edward IV had ordered the execution of his brother George, Duke of Clarence, and the suspicion that her other son Richard III had murdered his nephews. Elizabeth Woodville is supposed to have sent her daughters to make merry at Richard III’s court while knowing that he had murdered her sons, those same Princes in the Tower. Elizabeth of York, as the decisive battle of Bosworth unfolded, could only await the results of what would prove a fight to the death between the man some say she had incestuously loved – her uncle Richard III – and the man she would in the end marry, Henry VII.

The second half of the fifteenth century is alive with female energy, yet the lives of the last Plantagenet women remain relatively unexplored. The events of this turbulent age are usually described in terms of men, under a patriarchal assumption as easy as that which saw Margaret Beaufort give up her own blood right to the throne in favour of her son Henry; or passed the heiress Anne Neville from one royal family to the other as though she were as insentient an object as any other piece of property.

Of the seven women who form the backbone of this book, the majority have already been the subject of at least one biographical study. The aim of this work, however, is to interweave these women’s individual stories, to trace the connections between them – connections which sometimes ran counter to the allegiances established by their men – and to demonstrate the way the patterns 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.

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.

PART ONE

ONE