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

As for Cecily Neville, it must have been hard for her to work out where Fortune’s wheel had left her. The loss of her husband and her second son, a shattering personal grief, was only weeks behind her; but now another son, her eldest, sat on the throne, opening up a world of possibilities. As Edward set out north again, it was his mother whom he commended to the burghers of London as his representative. The Bishop of Elphin concluded his letter about Cecily’s reception of the battlefield news by urging the Papal Legate: ‘As soon as you can, write to the King, the Chancellor, and other Lords, as I see they wish it; also to the Duchess, who is partial to you, and [holds] the king at her pleasure.’ In the early days of Edward IV’s reign, perhaps the bishop was not the only one to consider that Cecily could rule her son as she wished. Edward granted to her the lands held by his father

and further subsidised her ever-lavish expenditure. She regarded herself as queen dowager, and played the part. Edward must, after all, have been aware that he had come to the throne by the efforts of her relations, and he was young enough for everyone – perhaps even including his mother – to underestimate his capabilities.

Cecily’s youngest daughter – fourteen-year-old Margaret of Burgundy, as she would become – was now installed at Greenwich, the luxurious riverside ‘pleasaunce’ that had been remodelled by Henry VI’s uncle Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester. Her two older sisters were already established elsewhere. Anne, the Yorks’ eldest child, had been matched in 1445 when she was six with Henry Holland, son of the great Duke of Exeter who, however, was committed to the Lancastrian cause. By the time she reached adulthood the couple were estranged

to the point where Anne notoriously found consolation elsewhere, with a Kent gentleman called Thomas St Leger. The next sister, Elizabeth, had recently been married to John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk (who, as a child, had nominally been married to Margaret Beaufort). John’s father had been the great minister of Henry VI murdered in 1450; his mother the duchess was the mighty Alice Chaucer, a natural Lancastrian who, however, doubtless saw this Yorkist alliance as being in the interests of her family’s safety. Elizabeth quickly began to produce a string of children – at least five sons and four daughters – and with her husband converted to the Yorkist side her future looked uncontroversial, the more so since John showed no aptitude for nor interest in active political office. But Margaret, two years younger than Elizabeth, was, crucially, still unmarried when her brother Edward came to the throne – and available to be offered in marriage as England’s princess.

Under the former regime, Greenwich had been used by Queen Marguerite, who had decorated it with her daisy emblem and added new windows, a great chamber, an arbour in the gardens and a gallery overlooking them. The daisies were equally fitting for this other Margaret. The whole family would come to use Greenwich regularly, but for the moment Edward seized on it primarily as a suitable and healthy residence for his three youngest siblings, and Margaret’s closeness to her brothers Richard and George would play an important part in English affairs through into the Tudor period.

Here Margaret, described by the chronicler Jean de Haynin as notably tall ‘like her brother Edward’ and having ‘an air of intelligence and wit’, would have continued her education. A well-to-do girl’s training in the fifteenth century usually centred on the religious and the practical – reading, in case she had to take over business responsibilities; some knowledge of arithmetic; and an understanding of household and estate management that might extend to a little property law. The technical skill of writing was rarer: even Margaret’s adult signature was rough and unformed. And though a girl might be expected to read the psalms in Latin from an early age, to be able to write the language was so unusual that even the learned Margaret Beaufort, says her confessor Fisher, had later to regret that she had not been taught to do so.

But perhaps this York Margaret benefited to some degree from being brought up with her brothers and their tutors. In later life her own books would be in French – which language she obviously was taught – and her collection of books (at least twenty-five, an impressive number for a woman), together with her habit of giving and receiving them as gifts, demonstrates considerable literary interest. Caxton would later – tactfully, but presumably also truthfully – acknowledge her help in correcting his written English. It was under her auspices that he published the first book to be printed in English, a translation from French of the tales of Troy, and he wrote of how she had ‘found a defaut in my English which she commanded me to amend’. Those books that Margaret later owned would be wonderfully illuminated in the lively contemporary style with flowers and fruit, animals and birds. Perhaps she got a full measure of enjoyment out of the gardens at Greenwich, but perhaps, too, the spirit of Duke Humfrey, a famed bibliophile, lingered on.

Margaret’s pronounced religiosity may have come from her mother, but although in later life she would give particular support to the practical orders of religion, and had as ardent a passion for relics of the saints as any other medieval lady, she seems to have had a more intellectual interest in the subject than Cecily Neville did. If there were to be a darker, almost hysterical, element in her religious faith, perhaps it only shows that the travails of her family, at her most impressionable age, had not left her untouched.

Anne Neville’s father the Earl of Warwick was now the man most thought to be the real power behind the throne; though in fact there is much to suggest that, from Warwick’s viewpoint, Edward found his own feet much too quickly. The commons ‘love and adore [Edward] as if he were their god’, wrote one Italian observer. All the same, Warwick, having helped the new king to his throne, was riding high, restless and busy. Meanwhile his wife and daughters probably spent some of their time at the great northern stronghold of Middleham, at the court and on the countess’s own family estates in the West Midlands; a countess had her own household, distinct from her husband’s, but this female-led world was not recorded as extensively.

Not that Anne’s world was always female. Edward’s younger brother Richard spent three years being brought up in Warwick’s household; and in 1465 he and Anne were recorded as being at the feast to celebrate the enthronement of Anne’s uncle George Neville as Archbishop of York. By this point it would have been evident that the nine-year-old Anne would be a significant heiress, whether or not the thirteen-year-old Richard was mature enough to take note. The continental chronicler Waurin recorded that even now Warwick contemplated marrying his daughters to the king’s two brothers. Marriage was in the air for others, too. The young King Edward was about to make a choice based (most unusually for the times) on ‘blind affection’, as Polydore Vergil describes it disapprovingly.

The story of how Elizabeth Woodville is supposed to have originally met Edward IV is one of the best known from history. But very little is known for certain about Elizabeth’s life before she made her royal match because no one was watching. Where fact was absent, fiction rushed in.

The sixteenth-century chronicler Hall had Edward hunting in the forest of Wychwood near Grafton, in Northamptonshire, and coming to the Woodville home for refreshment. Other traditions say Whittlebury Forest, where an oak was long celebrated for the legend that Elizabeth had stood under it – bearing her petition to be granted the lands owed to her under the terms of her dowry, and accompanied by the pleading figures of the two little boys she had borne her dead husband – in order to catch the king’s attention as he rode by. Either way Elizabeth, Hall said, ‘found such grace in the King’s eyes that he not only favoured her suit, but much more fantasised her person. … For she was a woman … of such beauty and favour that with her sober demeanour, lovely looking and feminine smiling (neither too wanton nor too humble) beside her tongue so eloquent and her wit so pregnant … she allured and made subject to her the heart of so great a king.’

After Edward, Hall said, ‘had well considered all the lineaments of her body and the wise and womanly demeanour that he saw in her’ he tried to bribe her into becoming his mistress (under the more flattering courtly appellation of his ‘sovereign lady’) in the hope of later becoming his wife. Whereupon she answered that ‘as she was unfitted for his honour to be his wife then for her own honesty she was too good to be his concubine’, an answer that gave rise to a ‘hot burning fire’ in the king so that he become quite determined to marry her. The same technique worked again when Anne Boleyn practised it on Elizabeth’s grandson Henry VIII, whose likeness to Edward has been much remarked.

Thomas More described the same scenario, which Shakespeare would echo almost exactly – the king struck by this woman ‘fair and of good favour, moderate of stature, well-made, and very wise’ who claimed that if she was too ‘simple’ to be his wife she was too good to be his concubine; virtuously refusing Edward’s advances, but ‘with so good manner, and words so well set, that she rather kindled his desire than quenched it’. Hearne’s ‘Fragment’, written in the early sixteenth century by someone who was probably at Edward’s court in its later years, similarly recorded that Edward ‘being a lusty prince attempted the stability and constant modesty of divers ladies and gentlewomen’ but, after resorting at ‘diverse times’ to Elizabeth, became impressed by her ‘constant and stable mind’.

Mancini, writing in 1483, even has Edward holding a dagger to her throat; again, as both More and Hall described the scene, ‘she remained unperturbed and determined to die rather than live unchastely with the king. Whereupon Edward coveted her much the more, and he judged the lady worthy to be a royal spouse… .’ One of the most dramatic versions appeared in Italy very soon after the time, in Antonio Cornazzano’s De Mulieribus Admirandis (‘of Admirable Women’). This reverses the scenario, to have Elizabeth holding the king off with a dagger – the very stuff of melodrama.

These are stories that equate the nobility of virtue – which Elizabeth could be allowed – with the blood nobility she did not possess. But how much of them is mere story and how much can be substantiated by historical evidence, is uncertain. The tale of the meeting under the tree may well be a myth, and its dating is confusing. It had been as far back as 1461, after Towton, that Edward had ridden slowly south and first found the Lancastrian Woodville family, with their widowed daughter Elizabeth Grey, licking their wounds. One account suggests that, because the romance started there, when the king left the district two days later he had not only ‘pardoned and remitted and forgiven’ Elizabeth’s father all his offences but ‘affectionately’ agreed to go on paying Jacquetta her annual dowry of ‘three hundred and thirty three marks four shillings and a third of a farthing’.

Woodville was indeed pardoned in June 1461, in December of which year the king also agreed that Jacquetta should receive her dowry; and Jean de Waurin early claimed that it was Edward’s love for Woodville’s daughter that had got the man his pardon. But the actual dates suggest a more prolonged and pragmatic sequence of events.

It is not until 1463 that Elizabeth Woodville next appears in the records, and then it is in the context of a property dispute over her dowry from her first husband. Indeed, in mid-April 1464 she was still negotiating for her dower lands as if she had no idea she was about to become queen.

It is possible that Elizabeth did indeed stand by the side of the road, but in 1464 rather than 1461; however, since her father had been appointed to Edward’s council in 1463 she would surely have had better ways to put her plea. Elizabeth may simply have met Edward at court after Woodville had been restored to favour. Caspar Weinreich’s Chronicle of 1464 claims that: ‘The king fell in love with [a mere knight’s] wife when he dined with her frequently.’ This would make sense. In the early 1460s his advisers mooted various foreign marriages for the new king, and Edward seemed quite content that negotiations should begin. This suggests that he was indeed several years into his reign before he met Elizabeth and changed his mind.

Hall and More have Edward first determining to marry Elizabeth and then taking secret counsel of his friends; but the more popular, and more dramatic, version talks of a marriage made in total secrecy. Robert Fabian, contemporary compiler of the New Chronicles of England and France and probably also of the Great Chronicle of London, describes a wedding at Grafton early in the morning on May Day ‘at which marriage no one was present but the spouse, the spousess, the Duchess of Bedford her mother, the priest, two gentlewomen and a young man to help the priest sing’.

After the ceremony, he says, the king ‘went to bed and so tarried there upon three or four hours’, returning to his men at Stony Stratford as though he had merely been out hunting but returning to Grafton where Elizabeth was brought every night to his bed, ‘in so secret manner that almost none but her mother was council.’ May Day is a suitably romantic date – as Malory put it: ‘all ye that be lovers, call unto your remembrance the month of May, like as did Queen Guinevere’. It is also Beltane, an important date in the pagan calendar, and in the future accusations would be made that witchcraft had been used to produce so unexpected a match.

The ceremony was certainly sufficiently covert that Richard III’s first parliament would later be able to denounce it as an ‘ungracious pretensed marriage’ by which ‘the order of all politic rule was perverted’ – one which had taken place privately ‘and secretly, without Edition of Banns, in a private Chamber, a profane place’. The secrecy of this marriage did not in fact make it illegal (other reasons would be brought in to support that allegation); indeed, the mere consent of the two parties before witnesses might have been enough. But it did seem odd, at a time when the Church was endeavouring to regulate marriage ceremonies – all the odder in view of the very different style in which a king’s wedding would usually be celebrated.

Elizabeth’s mother Jacquetta would be blamed for her part in making this marriage; but there were two mothers in this story. Whether Cecily heard before the event and failed to dissuade her son, or learned of the marriage afterwards, she was furious. More’s account of her arguments against Elizabeth goes on for pages, urging the vital importance of marrying for foreign alliance, and complaining ‘that it was not princely to marry his own subject, no great occasion leading thereunto, no possessions, or other commodities, depending thereupon, but only as it were a rich man would marry his maid, only for a little wanton dotage upon her person’.

Her person, of course, was very much the question. The medieval ideal of female beauty favoured golden hair, dark eyebrows, pale skin, a high forehead, small but slightly full lips, and eyes that were sparkling and usually grey. As for the rest of the body, to quote one contemporary writer, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, ‘Let the upper arms, as long as they are slender, be enchanting. Let the fingers be soft and slim in substance, smooth and milk-white in appearance, long and straight in shape … Let the snowy bosom present both breasts like virginal gems set side by side. Let the waist be slim, a mere handful … let the leg show itself graceful, let the remarkably dainty foot wanton with its own daintiness.’

The depiction or description of queens at this time often owed more to the ideal than to reality. Marguerite of Anjou, for instance, appeared in one illustration with honey-blonde hair, despite the Milanese description of her as dark. Queens were usually shown as blonde because it was attributed to the Virgin Mary. But surviving images of Elizabeth Woodville do suggest a genuine beauty that shines down the centuries as well as conforming to the medieval ideal – beauty enough to eclipse the trying fashion for a high shaven forehead and hair drawn plainly back. A depiction from the 1470s shows her wearing a red dress beneath a blue cloak, like that of the Virgin Mary – red for earthly nature, blue for heavenly attributes – with roses, emblematic of virginity, and gillyflowers, which stood for virtuous love and motherhood. Elizabeth had chosen the deep red gillyflower as her personal symbol; the name itself meant ‘queen of delights’.

So even Cecily had to admit that there might be ‘nothing to be misliked’ in the person of ‘this widow’. But she, and many others among Edward’s advisers, found plenty more of which to complain. Firstly, of course, there was the simple difference in rank, and the fact that Elizabeth brought no great foreign alliance. Warwick – convinced that only a French marriage would put an end to French support for Marguerite of Anjou – had been in the process of negotiating for Bona of Savoy when Edward broke the news of this other contract. The Italian visitor Mancini would later claim that it was Cecily who declared her son illegitimate since his choice of a woman of lower rank seemingly proved he could not be of the blood of kings.

It is debatable just how far from suitable Elizabeth actually was. Certainly, she was not the princess a king might have been expected to marry. Her mother Jacquetta did come from the cadet branch of the Luxembourg family that gave her connections with the emperors of Germany and the kings of Bohemia. But a woman’s status came from her father, and a mother could not share her superior rank with her husband and children. That said, throughout the Middle Ages high-born women had chosen to reflect their maternal heritage, most notably in the arms displayed on their seals; and when the time came for Elizabeth’s coronation, much play would be made of her connections with European royalty. Then again, there may have been some popularity value in Elizabeth’s very Englishness after the experience with French Marguerite, and even a reconciliatory gain from the Woodville family’s attachment to the Lancastrian cause.

Another problem was Elizabeth’s widowhood. There was a strong sentiment (More and Mancini both put it higher and make it a custom) that the king’s bride should be a virgin, not a widow: even more important if she was to provide the children who would inherit the throne. Decades later Isabella of Castile was still complaining that Edward had refused her for ‘a widow of England’; and the king’s brother Clarence, said Mancini, went so far as to declare the marriage illegal for this reason. Later, another, more serious, issue would raise its head.

Edward’s response to his mother, More says, was ‘that he knew himself out of her rule’. Playing to Cecily’s well-known religiosity, he added that, ‘marriage being a spiritual thing’, it should follow the guidance of God who had inclined these two parties ‘to love together’

rather than be made for temporal advantage. As for Warwick, Edward added, surely he could not be so unreasonable as ‘to look that I should in choice of wife rather be ruled by his eye than by my own, as though I were a ward that were bound to marry by the appointment of a guardian’.

Edward was getting tired of his mother’s, and his mentor’s, governance. And anyway, the deed was done; in the face of mounting rumours Edward admitted as much to his council in September 1464 – even if, said Waurin, in a ‘right merry’ way that probably indicated embarrassment. Elizabeth was presented to the court on 30 September in the chapel of Reading Abbey. Led in by Edward’s brother Clarence and the Earl of Warwick for a ceremony that may have been aimed at replacing the big public wedding that was customary for a queen, she received homage offered on bended knee.

The only Englishwoman to become queen consort

since the Norman Conquest, Elizabeth Woodville was crowned the following spring in a ceremony of great magnificence at which her mother’s royal kin were carefully given a prominent part. Edward had ordered from abroad ‘divers jewels of gold and precious stones, against the Coronation of our dear wife the Queen’; silk for her chairs and saddle; plate, a gold cup and basin at £108 5s 6d; and two cloths of gold. Other expenses show a more homely touch: the bridgemaster of London Bridge bought paint, glue, coloured paper, ‘party gold’ and ‘party silver’. Elizabeth was greeted by a pageant as she crossed the river, coming from Eltham to the south. It included six effigies of virgins with kerchiefs on their heads over wigs made of flax and dyed with saffron; and two of angels, their wings resplendent with nine hundred peacock feathers. Elizabeth made her way to the Tower, where tradition dictated she would spend the first night; next day she was carried in a horse litter to Westminster where she was to spend the night, her arrival heralded by the white and blue splendour of several dozen new-made Knights of the Bath.

Details of the coronation survive in a contemporary manuscript. Elizabeth, clad in a purple mantle, entered Westminster Hall under a canopy of cloth of gold, flanked by bishops and with a sceptre in each hand. Removing her shoes before she entered sacred ground, she walked barefoot followed by her attendants: Cecily’s sister, the dowager Duchess of Buckingham; Edward’s sisters Elizabeth and Margaret; the queen’s own mother; and more than forty other ladies of rank. As the procession moved up to the high altar the queen first knelt, and then prostrated herself, for the solemnities. She was anointed with the holy unction and escorted to her throne ‘with great reverence and solemnity’. After mass was sung, the queen processed back into the palace. This, for the queen and to a greater degree for the king, was a ceremony that not only acknowledged but actually created the sacred nature of monarchy.

Elizabeth retired into her chamber before the banquet began: a meal of three ‘courses’, each of some fifteen or twenty dishes, served with the utmost ceremony. First the queen washed in a basin held by the Duke of Clarence. For the entire duration of the meal the Duke of Suffolk (husband of the king’s sister Elizabeth) and the Earl of Essex knelt beside her. To signal each course trumpets were sounded, and a procession of mounted knights made the rounds of the great Westminster Hall. Musicians played ‘full melodiously and in most solemn wise’, and the festivities ended next day with a tournament. The king had not been present at the ceremonies, and this was an accepted tradition: the queen was always the most important person at her own coronation. But there is another whose name does not appear in the records: the king’s mother, Cecily.

It was at this time that Cecily elaborated her title of ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’

– used by her, though more often accorded to Margaret Beaufort – into ‘Cecily, the king’s mother, and late wife unto Richard in right king of England and of France and lord of Ireland’, or, more directly, ‘Queen by Right’. Though she spent less time now at court she still kept an apartment – the ‘queen’s chambers’ – in one of the royal palaces. Rather than attempt to dispossess his mother, Edward built a new one for his wife.

According to one report – admittedly made to Elizabeth’s brother – the marriage was, broadly speaking, acceptable in the country: Marguerite, and the turmoil for which she was blamed, had put the ordinary people off foreign royalty. But a newsletter from Bruges reported differently, stating that the ‘greater part of the lords and the people in general seem very much dissatisfied’. In court circles it was certainly unwelcome. Woodville ascendancy was bound to upset both the royal family and the great magnate Warwick; the more so, since those who had shed blood for York now saw a household of Lancastrians raised to high status.

EIGHT

Fortune’s Pageant

And, being a woman, I will not be slack

To play my part in Fortune’s pageant.

Henry VI Part 2, 1.2

In April 1462 the last queen, the deposed Marguerite, had made her way from Scotland to France; a register of the city of Rouen, published in July, describes her a few months afterwards being received ‘with much honour, by the gentlemen of the King’s suite’, and lodging in the house of a Rouen lawyer. Since the previous year she had been using her old admirer Pierre de Brezé to negotiate a loan and a fleet with which to seize the Channel Islands as a bridgehead from France to England: ‘If the Queen’s intentions were discovered, her friends would unite with her enemies to kill her,’ de Brezé said. Foreseeing ‘good winnings’, the French king Louis (possibly under pressure from his mother, Marguerite’s aunt) did eventually give her aid, with Marguerite, in a gesture which would have horrified her English subjects, promising to cede him Calais in return. In the autumn of 1462 she had sailed back to Scotland, bringing forty ships and eight hundred soldiers provided by the French king and under de Brezé’s command. Collecting some Scots led by Somerset (and nominally by the deposed Henry VI), she pushed across the border into northern England where she made ‘open war’, as the Great Chronicle of London put it.

Her campaign was unsuccessful. When the Yorkist guns on England’s northern coast were trained upon her she was forced to turn tail: ‘And in a carvel, wherein was the substance of her goods, she fled; and as she sailed there came upon her such a tempest that she was fain to leave the carvel and take a fisher’s boat, and so went a-land to Berwick; and the said carvel and goods were drowned.’ Edward himself rode north to confront her; but the next spring, as Gregory’s Chronicle describes it, she was still fighting on in the north.

In the summer of 1463 there took place one of the few episodes from these wars which have been converted into story. The Duke of Burgundy’s official historian Georges Chastellain may have heard the gist of it from Marguerite herself only a few months later – but Chastellain was a poet and rhetorician as much as a chronicler, for whom the message may have been more important than the facts. As Marguerite and her party were fleeing back towards Bamburgh, so the story runs, she and her son were separated from their followers. Suddenly a band of robbers leaped out of the bushes, seized the baggage, tore the jewels from around her neck and dragged her before their leader. He had drawn his sword to cut her throat when she threw herself on her knees and implored him not to disfigure her body past recognition, for, as she said: ‘I am the daughter and wife of a king, and was in past times recognized by yourselves as your queen.’ In the best tradition of monster-taming myth, the man, known as Black Jack, in turn fell on his knees before her and then led her and her son to a secret cave in Deepden Woods, where she sheltered until de Brezé found her.