SARAH GRISTWOOD
Blood Sisters
The Hidden Lives of the Women
Behind the Wars of the Roses

Copyright

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperPress in 2012

Copyright © Sarah Gristwood 2012

Sarah Gristwood asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007309306

Ebook Edition © 2013 ISBN: 9780007309320

Version: 2017-03-29

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

List of Illustrations

Map

Simplified Family Tree

Glossary of Names

Reigns

Prologue

PART ONE: 1445–1461

1. Fatal Marriage

2. The Red Rose and the White

3. A Woman’s Fear

4. No Women’s Matters

5. Captain Margaret

6. Mightiness Meets Misery

PART TWO: 1461–1471

7. To Love a King

8. Fortune’s Pageant

9. Domestic Broils

10. That Was a Queen

PART THREE: 1471–1483

11. My Lovely Queen

12. Fortune’s Womb

13. Mother of Griefs

14. A Golden Sorrow

PART FOUR: 1483–1485

15. Weeping Queens

16. Innocent Blood

17. Letters to Richmond

18. Anne My Wife

19. In Bosworth Field

PART FIVE: 1485–1509

20. True Succeeders

21. Golden Sovereignty

22. The Edge of Traitors

23. Civil Wounds

24. Like a Queen Inter Me

25. Our Noble Mother

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Footnotes

Notes

Picture Section

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. Marguerite of Anjou with Henry VI and John Talbot in the ‘Shrewsbury Talbot Book of Romances’, c.1445. British Library, Royal 15 E. VI, f.2v (© The British Library Board)

2. The stained-glass Royal Window in Canterbury Cathedral (© Crown Copyright. English Heritage)

3. Margaret Beaufort by Rowland Lockey, late 16th century (By permission of the Master and Fellows of St John’s College, Cambridge)

4. Margaret Beaufort’s emblems (© Neil Holmes/The Bridgeman Art Library)

5. Cecily Neville’s father, the Earl of Westmoreland, with the children of his second marriage (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris/Flammarion/The Bridgeman Art Library)

6. Portrait of Elizabeth Woodville from 1463 (© The Print Collector/Corbis)

7. Anne Neville depicted in the Rous Roll, 1483–85. British Library Add 48976 (© The British Library Board)

8. King Richard III by unknown artist, oil on panel, late 16th century; after unknown artist late 15th century (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

9. The risen Christ appearing to Margaret of Burgundy by the Master of Girard de Rousillon, from Le dyalogue de la ducesse de bourgogne a Ihesu Crist by Nicolas Finet, c.1470. British Library Add.7970, f.1v (© The British Library Board)

10. Elizabeth of York by unknown artist, oil on panel, late 16th century; after unknown artist c. 1500 (© National Portrait Gallery, London)

11. The birth of Caesar from Le fait des Romains, Bruges, 1479. British Library Royal 17 F.ii, f.9 (© The British Library Board)

12. The Devonshire Hunting Tapestry – Southern Netherlands (possibly Arras), 1430–40 (© Victoria and Albert Museum, London)

13. Procession at the Funeral of Queen Elizabeth, 1502 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)

14. The preparations for a tournament. Illustration for René of Anjou’s Livre des Tournois, 1488–89? Bibliothèque nationale de France, Francais 2692, f.62v–f.63 (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

15. Margaret of Burgundy’s crown, Aachen Cathedral Treasury (© Domkapitel Aachen (photo: Pit Siebigs))

16. Song ‘Zentil madona’: from Chansonnier de Jean de Montchenu, 1475?, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS Rothschild 2973, f.3v–f.4 (Bibliothèque nationale de France)

17. The Tower of London from the Poems of Charles of Orleans, c.1500. British Library, Royal 16 F. II f.73 (© The British Library Board)

18. Elizabeth of York’s signature on a page of ‘The Hours of Elizabeth the Queen’, c.1415–20. British Library Add 50001, f.22 (© The British Library Board)

19. Wheel of Fortune illumination from the Troy Book, c.1455–1462. British Library Royal 18 D.II, f.30v (© The British Library Board)

MAP

SIMPLIFIED FAMILY TREE

GLOSSARY OF NAMES

ANNE: the name borne by Anne Neville (1456–85); daughter to the Earl of Warwick, wife first to Edward of Lancaster and then to Richard III. Her mother was another Anne, the heiress Anne Beauchamp, Countess of Warwick (1426–90). Anne was also the name given to the Duchess of Exeter (1439–76), eldest daughter of Richard, Duke of York and Cecily Neville and sister to Edward IV and Richard III. Other English noblewomen bearing the name include one of Cecily’s sisters, who became Duchess of Buckingham; one of Edward IV’s daughters; and Anne Mowbray who was married in childhood to Edward’s youngest son.

BEAUFORT: the family name of Margaret Beaufort (1443–1509), mother to Henry VII, and of the Dukes of Somerset, one of whom was Margaret’s father. The Beaufort family also included Cardinal Beaufort, advisor to Henry VI.

BUTLER, ELEANOR (?–1468): born Eleanor Talbot; the woman who was later said to have been secretly married to Edward IV.

CECILY NEVILLE (or Cicely, 1415–95): matriarch of the York dynasty; wife to Richard, Duke of York; mother to Edward IV and Richard III. The name was also shared by Cecily’s granddaughter (Edward IV’s daughter, 1469–1507).

CLARENCE, GEORGE, DUKE OF (1449–78): son to Cecily Neville and Richard Duke of York. The second of their sons to survive into maturity, Clarence was famously executed on the orders of his brother Edward IV.

DORSET, MARQUIS OF (1455–1501): the title bestowed on Thomas Grey, the eldest son of Elizabeth Woodville by her first husband, John Grey.

EDMUND, EARL OF RUTLAND (1443–60): second son to Richard, Duke of York and Cecily Neville, killed young in battle.

EDWARD: this name was borne most importantly by Edward IV (1442–83), eldest son to Richard, Duke of York and Cecily Neville; and by his own eldest son (1470–83?), the elder of the ‘Princes in the Tower’, who would have reigned as Edward V. The name Edward was also bestowed, however, on the eldest sons both of Henry VI (‘Edward of Lancaster’, 1453–71) and of Richard III (‘Edward of Middleham’, 1476?–84). Both were, in their time, also Prince of Wales. The name Edward may have been considered particularly suitable for kings or prospective kings, perhaps because the last undisputed king of England had been the mighty Edward III. Henry VIII, in the next century, would also call his son ‘Edward’.

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.

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.¹

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.² 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
Fatal Marriage

O peers of England, shameful is this league,

Fatal this marriage, cancelling your fame

Henry VI Part 2, 1.1

It was no way for a queen to enter her new country, unceremoniously carried ashore as though she were a piece of baggage – least of all a queen who planned to make her mark. The Cock John, the ship that brought Marguerite of Anjou across the Channel, had been blown off course and so battered by storms as to have lost both its masts. She arrived, as her new husband Henry VI put it in a letter, ‘sick of ye labour and indisposition of ye sea’. Small wonder that the Marquess of Suffolk, the English peer sent to escort her, had to carry the seasick fifteen-year-old ashore.¹ The people of Portchester in Hampshire, trying gallantly to provide a royal welcome, had heaped carpets on the beach where the chilly April waves clawed and rattled at the pebbles, but Marguerite’s first shaky steps on English soil took her no further than a nearby cottage, where she fainted. From there she was carried to a local convent to be cared for.

This would be the woman whom Shakespeare, in Henry VI Part 3, famously dubbed the ‘she-wolf’ of France, her ‘tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’. The Italian-born chronicler Polydore Vergil,² by contrast, would look back on her as ‘imbued with a high courage above the nature of her sex … a woman of sufficient forecast, very desirous of renown, full of policy, counsel, comely behaviour, and all manly qualities’. But then Vergil was writing for the Tudor monarch Henry VII, sprung of Lancastrian stock, and he would naturally wish to praise the wife of the last Lancastrian king, the woman who had fought so hard for the Lancastrian cause. Few queens of England have so divided opinion; few have suffered more from the propaganda of their enemies.

Marguerite of Anjou was niece by marriage to the French king Charles VII, her own father, René, having been described as a man of many crowns but no kingdoms. He claimed the thrones of Naples, Sicily, Jerusalem and Hungary as well as the duchy of Anjou; titles so empty, however, that early in the 1440s he had settled in France, his brother-in-law’s territory. At the beginning of 1444 the English suggested a truce in the seemingly endless conflict between France and England known as the Hundred Years War; the arrangement would be cemented by a French bride for England’s young king, Henry VI. Unwilling to commit his own daughters, Charles had proffered Marguerite. Many royal and aristocratic marriages were made to seal a peace deal with an enemy, the youthful bride a passive potential victim. But in this case, the deal-making was particularly edgy.

In the hope of ending the long hostilities the mild-mannered Henry VI – so unfitting a son, many thought, to Henry V, the hero of Agincourt – had not only agreed to take his bride virtually without dowry but to cede the territories of Anjou and Maine, which the English had long occupied. This concession would be deeply unpopular among his subjects. Nor did the thunder and lightning that had greeted Marguerite’s arrival augur well to contemporary observers.

The new queen had been ill since setting out from Paris several weeks before. She progressed slowly towards the French coast, distributing Lenten alms and making propitiatory offerings at each church where she heard mass, dining with dignitaries and taking leave of her relations one by one along the way. But gradually, in the days after her arrival England, she recovered her health in a series of convents, amid the sounds and scents of Church ritual with all their reassuring familiarity. On 10 April 1445 at Southampton, one ‘Master Francisco, the Queen’s physician’ was paid 69s 2d ‘for divers aromatic confections, particularly and specially purchased by him, and privately made into medicine for the preservation of the health of the said lady’.

If Suffolk’s first concern had been to find medical attention for Marguerite, his second was to summon a London dressmaker to attend her before the English nobility caught sight of her shabby clothes: ‘to fetch Margaret Chamberlayne, tyre maker, to be conducted into the presence of our lady, the Queen … and for going and returning [from London to Southampton], the said Margaret Chamberlaune was paid there by gift of the Queen, on the 15th of April, 20s.’ Among the various complaints the English were preparing to make of their new queen, one would be her poverty.

Before Marguerite’s party set out towards the capital there was time for something a little more courtly, if one Italian contemporary, writing to the Duchess of Milan three years later, is to be believed. An Englishman had told him that when the queen landed in England the king had secretly taken her a letter, having first dressed himself as a squire: ‘While the queen read the letter the king took stock of her,³ saying that a woman may be seen very well when she reads a letter, and the queen never found out it was the king because she was so engrossed in reading the letter, and she never looked at the king in his squire’s dress, who remained on his knees all the time.’ It was the same trick that Henry VIII would play on Anne of Cleves almost a century later – a game from the continental tradition of chivalry.⁴

Henry VI, if the Milanese correspondent is to be believed, saw ‘a most handsome woman, though somewhat dark’ – and not, the Milanese tactfully assured his duchess, ‘so beautiful as your Serenity’. At the French court Marguerite had already acquitted herself well enough to win an admirer in the courtly tradition, Pierre de Brezé, to carry her colours at the joust; and to allow the Burgundian chronicler Barante to write that she ‘was already renowned in France for her beauty and wit and her lofty spirit of courage’. The beauty conventionally attributed to queens features in the scene where Shakespeare’s Marguerite first meets Henry VI: it was the lofty spirit that, in the years ahead, was to prove the difficulty. Vergil too wrote that Marguerite exceeded others of her time ‘as well in beauty as wisdom’; and though it is not easy to guess real looks from the conventions of medieval portraiture, it is hard not to read determination and self-will in the swelling brow and prominent nose that are evident in images of Marguerite of Anjou – in particular the medallion by Pietro di Milano.

The royal couple met officially five days after Marguerite had landed, and had their marriage formalised just over a week later in Titchfield Abbey. The first meeting failed to reveal either the dangerous milkiness in the man, or the capacity for violence in the young woman. But the first of the problems they would face was – as Marguerite moved towards London – spelt out in the very festivities.

Her impoverished father had at least persuaded the clergy of Anjou to provide funds for a white satin wedding dress embroidered with silver and gold marguerites; and to buy violet and crimson cloth of gold and 120 pelts of white fur to edge her robes. As her party approached the city she was met at Blackheath by Henry’s uncle, the Duke of Gloucester, with five hundred of his retainers and conducted to his luxurious riverside ‘pleasaunce’ at Greenwich. Gloucester had in fact opposed the marriage, seeing no advantage in it for England.

Marguerite’s entry into London on 28 May, after resting a night at the Tower, was all that it should have been. A coronet of ‘gold rich pearls and precious stones’ had been placed on the bride’s head, nineteen chariots of ladies and their gentlewomen accompanied her, and the conduits ran with wine white and red. The livery companies turned out in splendid blue robes with red hoods, while the council had ordered the inspection of roofs along the way, anticipating that eager crowds would climb on to them to see the new queen pass by.

The surviving documentation details a truly royal provision of luxury goods for Marguerite’s welcome. A letter from the king to his treasurer orders up ‘such things as our right entirely Well-beloved Wife the Queen must necessarily have for the Solemnity of her Coronation’. They included a pectoral of gold embellished with rubies, pearls and diamonds; a safe conduct for two Scotsmen and their sixteen servants, ‘with their gold and silver in bars and wallets’; a present of £10 each to five minstrels of the King of Sicily (the nominal title of Marguerite’s father) ‘who lately came to England to witness the state and grand solemnity on the day of the Queen’s coronation’; and 20 marks reward to one William Flour of London, goldsmith, ‘because the said Lord the King stayed in the house of the said William on the day that Queen Margaret, his consort, set out from the Tower’.

The ceremonies were ‘royally and worthily held’, the cost reckoned at an exorbitant £5500. All the same, Marguerite had had to pawn her silver plate at Rouen to pay her sailors’ wages; and as details of the marriage deal began to leak out, the English would feel justified in complaining that they had bought ‘a queen not worth ten marks’. In the years ahead, they would discover they had a queen who – for better or worse – would try to rewrite the rules, and indeed the whole royal story.

As Marguerite rode into her new capital, the pageantry with which she was greeted spelt out her duty. It was hoped that through her ‘grace and high benignity’:

Twixt the realms two, England and France

Peace shall approach, rest and unite,

Mars set aside, with all his cruelty …

This was a weight of expectation placed on many a foreign royal bride. Earlier in the fifteenth century the Frenchwoman Christine de Pizan had written in The Treasury (or, Treasure) of the City of Ladies that women, being by nature ‘more gentle and circumspect’, could be the best means of pacifying men: ‘Queens and princesses have greatly benefitted this world by bringing about peace between enemies, between princes and their barons, or between rebellious subjects and their lords.’ After all, the Queen of Heaven, Mary, interceded for sinners. Marguerite would be neither the first nor the last to find herself uncomfortably placed between the needs of her adopted country and that of her birth. The Hundred Years War had been a conflict of extraordinary bitterness. This bitterness Marguerite, by her very presence as a living symbol, was supposed to soothe; but it was a position of terrifying responsibility.

Her kinsman the Duke of Orléans wrote that Marguerite seemed as if ‘formed by Heaven to supply her royal husband the qualities which he required in order to become a great king’. But the English expectations of a queen were not those of a Frenchman, necessarily. Marguerite’s mother, Isabelle of Lorraine, had run the family affairs while René of Anjou spent long years away on campaign or in captivity. Her grandmother, Yolande of Aragon, in whose care she spent many of her formative years, had acted as regent for her eldest son, Marguerite’s uncle; and she had been one of the chief promoters of Joan of Arc, who had helped sweep the French Dauphin to victory against the English. Those English, by contrast, expected their queens to take a more passive role. Uncomfortable memories still lingered of Edward II’s wife Isabella, little more than a century before: the ‘she-wolf of France’, as Marguerite too would be dubbed, who was accused of having murdered her husband to take power with her lover. Had Marguerite’s new husband been a strong king, the memories might never have surfaced – but Henry showed neither inclination nor ability for the role he was called on to play.

Henry VI had succeeded while in his cradle, and had grown up a titular king under the influence of his older male relatives. Perhaps that had taught him to equate kingship with passivity. For although Henry had now reached adulthood he still, at twenty-three, showed no aptitude for the reins of government. There has always been debate over what, if anything, was actually wrong with Henry. Some contemporaries describe him as both personable and scholarly; others suggest he may have been simple-minded, or had inherited a streak of insanity. But what is certain is that he was notably pious, notably prudish – described by a papal envoy as more like a monk than a king – and seemed reluctant to take any kind of decision or lead. He was the last man on earth, in other words, to rule what was already a turbulent country. At the end of Henry IV Part 2 Shakespeare vividly dramatises the moment at which the new Henry V, this Henry’s father, moves from irresponsible princedom to the harsh realities of kingship. There was, however, no sign of Henry VI reaching a similar maturity. It was a situation which left Marguerite herself to confront the challenges of monarchy.

It is difficult to conjure up a picture of Marguerite or her husband in the first few years of their marriage. Anything written about them later is coloured by hindsight, and the early days of Marguerite’s career tend to be lost in the urgent clamour of events just ahead. But there is no reason to doubt that her expectation was that of a normal queenship, albeit more active than the English were accustomed to see. Though her husband’s exchequer may have been depleted, though English manners might not compare to those across the Channel, her life must at first have been one of pleasant indulgence.

Christine de Pizan gives a vivid picture of life for a lady at the top of the social tree. ‘The princess or great lady awaking in the morning from sleep finds herself lying in her bed between soft, smooth sheets, surrounded by rich luxury, with every possible bodily comfort, and ladies and maids-in-waiting at hand to run to her if she sighs ever so slightly, ready on bended knee to provide service or obey orders at her word.’ The long list of estates granted to Marguerite as part of her dower entitlement forms an evocative litany:

To be had, held and kept of the said Consort of Henry, all the appointed Castles, Honours, Towns, Domains, Manors, Wapentaches, Bales, county estates, sites of France, carriages, landed farms, renewed yearly, the lands, houses, possessions and other things promised, with all their members and dependencies, together with the lands of the Military, Ecclesiastic advocacies, Abbotcies, Priories, Deaneries, Colleges, Capellaries, singing academies, Hospitals, and of other religious houses, by wards, marriages, reliefs, food, iron, merchandize, liberties, free customs, franchise, royalties, fees of honour … forests, chaises, parks, woods, meadows, fields, pastures, warrens, vivaries, ponds, fish waters, mills, mulberry trees, fig trees …

It is the same genial picture of a queen’s life that can be seen in a tapestry that may have been commissioned for Marguerite’s wedding – there are Ms woven into the horses’ bridles, and marguerites, her personal symbol, are sported by the ladies. It depicts a hunting scene bedecked with flowers and foliage, the ladies in their furred gowns, hawk on wrist, wearing the characteristic headdress of the time, a roll of jewelled and decorated fabric peaking down over the brow and rising behind the head. Hunting, with ‘boating on the river’, dancing and ‘meandering’ in the garden were all recreations allowed by Christine de Pizan in a day otherwise devoted to the tasks of governance (if relevant), religious duties and charity. Visiting the poor and sick, ‘touching them and gently comforting them’, as she wrote, sounds much like the work of modern royalty. ‘For the poor feel especially comforted and prefer the kind word, the visit, and the attention of the great and powerful personage over anything else.’ Letters show Marguerite asking the Archbishop of Canterbury to treat ‘a poor widow’ with ‘tenderness and favour’; and seeking alms for two other ‘poor creatures and of virtuous conversation’.

But Marguerite had been brought up to believe that queenship went beyond simple Christian charity.⁵ Not only did she have the example of her mother and grandmother, but her father was one of the century’s leading exponents of the chivalric tradition, obsessed with that great fantasy of the age, the Arthurian legends. Indeed, when Thomas Malory wrote his English version of the tales, the Morte d’Arthur, completed in 1470, his portrayal of Queen Guinevere may have been influenced by Marguerite. It may have been on the occasion of Marguerite’s betrothal that René organised a tournament with knights dressed up as Round Table heroes and a wooden castle named after Sir Lancelot’s Joyeuse Garde. A bound volume of Arthurian romances was presented to the bride.

René was the author not only of a widely translated book on the perfect management of the tournament, but also of the achingly romantic Livre de Coeur de L’Amour Epris. He may have illustrated it, too; and if so, it has been suggested that his figure of Hope – who repeatedly saves the hero – may have been modelled on Marguerite. Queens in the Arthurian and other legends of chivalry were not only active but sometimes ambiguous creatures. Ceremonious consorts and arbiters of behaviour, they were also capable of dramatic and sometimes destructive action: it was Guinevere who brought down Camelot.

The two visions of queenship came together in the Shrewsbury – or Talbot – Book, a wedding present to Marguerite from John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury. Although one of England’s most renowned military commanders, he would not play much part in the political tussles ahead. On the illuminated title page, Henry and Marguerite are seated crowned and hand in hand, her purple mantle fastened with bands of gold and jewels, the blue background painted with gold stars. At her feet kneels Talbot, presenting his book which she graciously accepts, the faintest hint of a smile lurking under her red-gold hair. All around are exquisite depictions of the daisy, her symbol. The image is at once benign and stately, an idealised picture of monarchy – for all that the facing page, tracing Henry VI’s genealogical claim to be king of France as well as of England, hints at political controversy. An anthology of Arthurian and other romances, poems and manuals of chivalry, the book also includes Christine de Pizan’s treatise on the art of warfare and one on the art of government – a guide not only to conducting one’s emotional life but also to running a country.

Henry had had his palaces refurbished for his bride – the queen’s apartments must have fallen out of use in his minority. Marguerite employed a large household and paid them handsomely, exploiting all the financial opportunities open to a queen to enable her to do so. Regulations for a queen’s household drawn up in the year of her arrival listed sixty-six positions, including a countess as senior lady with her own staff, a chamberlain, three chaplains, three carvers, a secretary, a personal gardener, pages of the beds and of the bakery, two launderers and various squires. Less than ten years later, the council had to suggest that the size of the queen’s household should be cut down to 120. She had, however, brought no relations and few French attendants with her, something which had been a problem with previous consorts. But what at first looked like a blessing meant that she would attach herself to new English advisers, ardently and unwisely.

On the journey from France Marguerite had learned to trust her escort Suffolk – the pre-eminent noble whom the Burgundian chronicler Georges Chastellain called England’s ‘second king’. She never saw any reason to change her mind – or to hide her feelings. Suffolk for his part, perhaps from a mixture of genuine admiration and intelligent politics, flattered and encouraged the young queen, even writing courtly verses playing on her name, the marguerite or daisy:

For wit thee well, it is a paradise

To see this flower when it begins to spread

With colours fresh enewed, white and red.

Although by the standards of courtly love poetry these phrases were mere convention, there were inevitably those who suspected something more than a platonic relationship between the girl in her teens and the man in his late forties – and suggested that a betrayal of England’s king might be allied to betrayal of England as a country. More than a century later, the idea of a romantic liaison between Marguerite and Suffolk was still sufficiently alive that Shakespeare has Suffolk, on their first meeting in France, falling for her beauty before he learns her identity. But even Shakespeare’s Suffolk mixes self-interest with sexual attraction, hoping to rule the king through Marguerite – and in reality, the queen had become close not only to the duke but also to his wife (born Alice Chaucer, granddaughter of the poet), which surely argues against an affair.

Suffolk had not been the only noble adviser to approve the French marriage. It had also had the endorsement of Cardinal Beaufort, the king’s great-uncle and one of the men who had governed the country during his minority, who shared Suffolk’s personal regard for Marguerite. In addition she enjoyed the support of the cardinal’s Beaufort relatives (the Somerset line that were Margaret Beaufort’s family). But against the marriage had been the king’s uncle Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester; and though Gloucester was now ageing and increasingly marginalised, his was in many ways the voice of the Francophobe English people.

All too soon, within weeks of Marguerite’s arrival and coronation, the matter of England’s ceding Maine and Anjou came to a head. It was said that Henry had promised to give back the territories ‘at the request of his wife’, as one angry reporter, Dr Thomas Gascoigne, put it: ‘… that aforesaid queen of ours begged the King of England that [the lands] so be given to her father at the urging of William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and his wife who earlier had promised to request it.’ And Gascoigne’s voice was but one among many.

In a sense he was right. In a letter to her uncle the king of France in late 1445 Marguerite promised: ‘And as to the deliverance which you desire to have of the Comté of Maine, and other matters contained in your said letters, we understand that my said lord has written to you at considerable length about this: and yet herein we will do for your pleasure the best that we can do …’ A letter of Henry’s own volunteers to give up territory in Maine, at least partly because of ‘our dear and well-beloved companion the queen, who has requested us to do this many times’. Reconciliation, and encouragement to implement the peace process, was what a queen was supposed to work at. Even the pageants had said so.

Popular blame for the loss of these lands fell largely on the head of Suffolk, the official negotiator of the marriage deal; but the situation did nothing for Marguerite’s popularity. Neither did the enmity of the old Duke of Gloucester. As Polydore Vergil wrote: ‘This woman, when she perceived the king her husband to do nothing of his own head but to rule wholly by the Duke of Gloucester’s advice … determined to take upon herself that charge and, little by little, deprive the duke of that great authority which he had lest she also might be reported to have little wit who would suffer her husband, now of mature years, to be under another man’s government …’ And Christine de Pizan had urged that a wife’s task should always be to preserve ‘the honour of her husband’. But it seems also likely that Marguerite had no conception of faction as an avoidable evil, or of the idea that the monarchy in England was supposed to be above such disputes. In the French court faction was the modus operandi, and it was normal for the crown to align itself with one or another party. The difficult relationship between England and France underpinned the first years of Marguerite of Anjou’s queenship. But it also dominated the lives of the women from the English families on either side of the political divide.

TWO
The Red Rose and the White

The red rose and the white are on his face,

The fatal colours of our striving houses

Henry VI Part 3, 2.5

Contemporary commentators never spoke of the ‘Wars of the Roses’.⁶ The name itself is a much later invention, variously credited to the historian David Hume in the eighteenth century and the novelist Sir Walter Scott in the nineteenth. The idea of the two roses was in currency not long after the event, and the white rose was indeed a popular symbol for the house of York, one party in the conflict, but the red rose was never widely identified with their opponents, the house of Lancaster, until the moment when Henry VII, poised to take over the country in 1485, sought an appropriate and appealing symbol – soon merged, in the first days of his kingship and after his marriage to Elizabeth of York, into the red and white unifying ‘Tudor rose’.

In some ways, moreover, the attractive iconography of the two roses does history a disservice, implying a neat, two-party, York/Lancaster divide. In reality the in-fighting which tore the ruling class of England apart for more than three decades was never just a dispute between two families, as clearly separate as the Montagues and the Capulets. The ‘Wars of the Roses’ are more accurately called the ‘Cousins’ War’, since all the protagonists were bound together by an infinite number of ties. And these conflicts should really be seen in terms of politics – secret alliances, queasy coalitions, public spin and private qualms. It was a world in which positions were constantly shifted and alliances changed from day to day.

In 1445, the last undisputed king of England had died almost seventy years before. He had been the powerful and prolific Edward III, latest in the long line of Plantagenet kings who had ruled England since the Norman Conquest. But in 1377 Edward was succeeded by his grandson (the son of his dead eldest son), the ten-year-old Richard II. Richard was deposed in 1399 by his cousin, Shakespeare’s Bolingbroke, who became Henry IV and was succeeded by his son Henry V, who in turn was succeeded by his son Henry VI. So by 1445 this Lancastrian line had successfully held the throne for almost half a century.

There had, however, been an alternative line of succession in the shape of the Yorkists – descended, like the Lancastrians, from Edward III’s younger sons. The white rose Yorkists had arguably a better claim than the Lancastrians, depending on the attitude taken to a woman’s ability to transmit rights to the throne: while the Lancastrian progenitor, John of Gaunt, had been only Edward’s third son, the Yorkists were descended in the female line from his second son Lionel, as well as in the male line from his fourth son, Edmund. And there was no denying the fact that, because Henry V had died so early and Henry VI had therefore succeeded as a nine-month-old baby, men had begun to cast their eyes around and think of their opportunities. There was no denying, either, that even now Henry seemed both reluctant and unfitted to assume his destined role. If Henry – now mature, now married – were indeed to prove himself a strong king, the Lancastrian line should hold the throne indefinitely. If not, however, there was that other possibility: the more so since the present Duke of York, while still loyal to the crown, was an able and active man (an ally of Humfrey Duke of Gloucester) and married to a woman – Cecily Neville – as forceful as himself.

In 1445, the year Marguerite of Anjou arrived in England, neither Anne Neville nor Margaret of Burgundy had yet been born, let alone Elizabeth of York. Elizabeth Woodville – about eight years old, though no one had bothered to record her precise date of birth – was growing up in rural obscurity. Indeed, out of our seven protagonists only Cecily Neville was a woman of full maturity. Margaret Beaufort was just a toddler, though her bloodline meant she was already a significant figure, a prize for whom others would compete. While Cecily would become the matriarch of the ruling house of York, Margaret’s bloodline was an important carrier of the Lancastrian claim. In fact, at this moment she (or any son she might bear) might be considered heir presumptive to the throne until children came to her kinsman Henry VI.

Margaret Beaufort had been born in 1443 at Bletsoe in Bedfordshire. Her mother was a comparatively obscure widow who already had children by her first husband, Sir Oliver St John. Margaret’s father, however, was the Earl (later Duke) of Somerset, and from him she inherited a debatable but intriguing relationship to the throne.

Her grandfather, the first Earl of Somerset, had been one of John of Gaunt’s sons by his mistress Katherine Swynford. John’s nephew, Richard II, had confirmed by binding statute that all the children of the pair were rendered legitimate by their subsequent marriage, and able to inherit dignities and estates ‘as fully, freely, and lawfully as if you were born in lawful wedlock’. When John of Gaunt’s eldest son (by Blanche of Lancaster) seized Richard’s throne, and had himself declared Henry IV, this first Earl of Somerset became half-brother to the king. But when in 1407 Somerset requested a clarification of the position laid down in that earlier legitimation, the resultant Letters Patent confirmed his entitlement to estates and noble rank with one very crucial proviso – ‘excepta dignitate regali’, excepting the dignities of the crown.

Less controversially, Margaret was also heiress to great lands. But by the time of her birth, the anomalies of her family’s position – royal, but yet possibly excluded from ruling – had been compounded by her father’s chequered career.

Somerset had been captured as a young man in the wars with France, and held captive there for seventeen years. When he returned to England only a few years before Margaret’s birth, he set about trying to assume the position to which he felt his blood entitled him – but, as the author of the Crowland Abbey chronicles put it, ‘his horn was exalted too greatly on high’.⁷ In 1443 his position – his closeness in blood to a king short of relatives – had led to his appointment as commander of England’s army in fresh hostilities against the French. But the campaign was a disaster and Somerset was summoned home in disgrace, his daughter having been born while he was away. Only a few months later, in May 1444, he died, the Crowland chronicler asserting (‘it is generally said’) that he had committed suicide – a heinous sin in the fifteenth century. The rumours surrounding his death only added to the dubiousness of the baby Margaret’s position, and perhaps later increased her well-documented insecurities.

Somerset’s brother Edmund, who succeeded to the title, was able to ensure that the Beaufort family retained their influence – not least because of the friendship he would strike up with the new queen. It was this friendship which would bring him into conflict with the Duke of York, and with York’s wife Cecily.

Born in 1415 to the powerful Ralph Neville, Earl of Westmorland, and known as the beautiful ‘Rose of Raby’ after the family stronghold, Cecily was the daughter of his second marriage, to Joan Beaufort – of the same notably Lancastrian family as Margaret Beaufort. But the political divisions of later years had not yet taken shape and indeed, though Cecily would become the Yorkist matriarch, her father had supported the Lancastrian usurpation of Richard II by John of Gaunt’s son, Henry IV.

Joan Beaufort was John of Gaunt’s daughter by Katherine Swynford – in later years Cecily, John of Gaunt’s granddaughter, might have found it galling that Margaret Beaufort could be regarded as inheriting John of Gaunt’s Lancastrian claim when she was only his great-granddaughter. The vital difference was that Margaret’s claim had come through her father and her father’s father – through the male line.⁸

By the time Cecily was born in May 1415, the Neville family was enormous. Joan Beaufort had two daughters from her first marriage, and when she married Ralph he had a large family already. They went on to produce ten more surviving children. By contrast Cecily’s husband, Richard of York, had just one sister. His marriage would bring him an almost unparalleled number of in-laws, but in the fifteenth century in-laws figured as potentially trustworthy allies and were more a blessing than a curse. Certainly the Nevilles would – in many ways, and for many years – do Richard proud.

Richard had been born in 1411, grandson to Edward III’s fourth son, Edmund. In 1415 his father (another Richard) was executed for his involvement in a plot against Henry V. The child eventually became Ralph Neville’s ward. By that time the boy had inherited the dukedom of York from a childless uncle; and later another childless uncle died, this time on his mother’s side, leaving Richard heir to the great Welsh and Irish lands of the Mortimer family.

Whether or not there were any thought that he might be king-in-waiting, York was an undoubted catch and it was inevitable that Ralph Neville would hope to keep this rich matrimonial prize within his own family. York’s betrothal to Cecily took place just a year after he came into the Nevilles’ care. The following year Ralph himself died, and York’s wardship passed into the hands of Cecily’s mother, Joan. Full, consummated marriage would have been legal when Cecily was twelve, in 1427, and had certainly taken place by 1429 when permission was received from the papacy for them jointly to choose a confessor.⁹

In medieval terms, Cecily was lucky. She would have known Richard well and he was only four years her elder. And since Richard, like Joan, had moved into the glittering world of the court, it seems probable that Cecily would have done so, too – unless separations are to be deduced from the fact that their first child was not born for several years, though after that they came with notable frequency.

Cecily gave birth to that first child – a daughter, Anne – in 1439 and a first son, Henry, in February 1441 at Hatfield: then the property of the Bishop of Ely, but frequently available to distingushed visitors or tenants. But Henry did not live long; just as well, perhaps, that Cecily had the distraction of an imminent move to France, where York had been appointed governor of the English territories, still haunted by the spectre of Joan of Arc, the holy Maid, burnt there only a decade before. In Rouen, the capital of English Normandy, the couple set up home in such state that an officer of the household had to be appointed to overlook Cecily’s expenditure,¹⁰ which included lavishly jewelled dresses and even a cushioned privy. Their second son, the future Edward IV, was born there in April 1442; another son, Edmund, in May 1443; and a second daughter, Elizabeth, the following year.

There is no evidence from that time of rumours concerning Edward’s paternity. But in the years ahead there would be debate about the precise significance of his date of birth¹¹ and where Richard of York had been nine months before it; about the hasty and modest ceremony at which he was christened; and about his adult appearance and physique, which were singularly different from Richard’s. It is true that Edward was christened in a private chapel in Rouen Castle, while his younger brother Edmund was christened in the far more public arena of Rouen Cathedral – but that may have meant no more than that Edward seemed sickly; all the likelier, of course, if he were premature. It is also true that Edward, the ‘Rose of Rouen’, was as tall and physically impressive as his grandson, Henry VIII, while Richard of York was dark and probably small. But perhaps Edward simply took after his mother, several of whose other children would be tall too.¹²

York himself showed no sign of querying his son’s paternity;¹³ while the fact that he and the English government held lengthy negotiations concerning a match between Edward and a daughter of the French king hardly suggests suspicion about his status. This was not, moreover, the first time an allegation of bastardy had been levelled at a royal son born abroad – John of Gaunt, born in Ghent, had been called a changeling. In the years ahead Cecily’s relationship with her husband would give every sign of being close and strong. And then there is the question of the identity of her supposed lover – an archer called Blaybourne. For a woman as status-conscious as Cecily – the woman who would be called ‘proud Cis’ – that seems especially unlikely. There are certainly queries as to how the story spread. The Italian Dominic Mancini,¹⁴ visiting England years later at a time when it had once again become a matter of hot debate, said that Cecily herself started the rumour when angered by Edward. A continental chronicler has it relayed by Cecily’s son-in-law Charles of Burgundy.¹⁵ But sheer political expedience apart, time and time again it will be seen how slurs could be cast on women (four out of the seven central to this book) through claims of sexual immorality.

Certainly Cecily was still queening it in Rouen as Duchess of York when, in the spring of 1445, the young Marguerite of Anjou passed through the city on her way to England and marriage with Henry VI. It may have been here that the thirty-year-old woman and the fifteen-year-old girl struck up a measure of friendship that would survive their husbands’ future differences – one example among many of women’s alliances across the York/Lancaster divide. But at this point Marguerite’s role was far the grander, even if beset with difficulty.

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