She Wolves (25 page)

Margaret refused to concede that her cause was lost whilst in France and continued to lobby Louis XI over the years, with little success.
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She must have spent the lonely years raising her son and attempting to keep his cause alive. The news, in 1465, that Henry VI had been captured hiding in northern England must also have been a blow and she must have considered it unlikely that she would ever see him again once he had been taken to the Tower – and she was correct.

Margaret was something of an embarrassment to Louis XI and it was only in 1470 that she became a useful political figure for him. Relations between Edward IV and his closest ally, the Earl of Warwick, had become increasingly strained during the 1460s and, in 1470, Warwick had fled to France. Louis XI saw an opportunity to attack Edward IV and offered to reconcile Margaret and Warwick so that they could launch a joint invasion of England. Margaret regarded Warwick as her greatest enemy and responsible for all her misery and it took Louis a great deal of effort to persuade her to even see him.
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Margaret, however, must have recognised the possibilities for the revival of her son’s cause and finally agreed to a reconciliation with Warwick. A formal reconciliation was staged on 22 July 1470 and, after keeping Warwick on his knees for quarter of an hour, Margaret formally forgave him.
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It was agreed that Warwick would restore Henry VI to the throne with French aid. To seal their alliance Margaret’s son would be married to Warwick’s daughter. Margaret cannot have been happy with this clause but, as a pragmatist, she must have seen it as a small price to pay for the restoration of her son’s position.

Warwick sailed to invade England before the marriage but, true to her word, Margaret allowed Edward of Lancaster to marry Warwick’s daughter, Anne Neville. Soon after the wedding, news reached her that Warwick had been successful and that Henry VI was restored and Edward IV fled. Margaret must have been jubilant and attempted to sail immediately to England. Bad weather, however, kept her party stranded in France.
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Finally in April 1471 Margaret and her son and daughterin-law were able to sail for England, landing on 18 April 1471. Almost immediately upon landing Margaret’s hopes would have been dashed. On the day that she set foot once again in England, Warwick had fought a battle with the now returned Edward IV at Barnet and had been heavily defeated and killed and Henry VI had been returned to the Tower.
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Polydore Vergil writes:

This disaster so sudden after Margaret’s landing must have dented her confidence but she had spent the last twenty years fighting and she was determined to continue to uphold her son’s rights.

Margaret immediately began raising an army in the West Country before marching on to Tewkesbury. There she found Edward IV’s army waiting for her and prepared to do battle. According to
Hall’s Chronicle
, Margaret and her son rode among the troops encouraging them, although Margaret was not present during the battle.
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She must have had an anxious wait for news, knowing that her son was fighting and that all his hopes depended on the day. She would have been distraught when news was brought to her that her army was completely destroyed and that her son was among the Lancastrians killed.
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With the loss of her son, Margaret lost the will to escape and was captured by Edward IV at a religious house near the battlefield.

With her son dead, Margaret was a broken woman with nothing left to fight for. She was taken as a prisoner to London and led through the streets and jeering crowds as the prize captive in Edward IV’s victory procession. Margaret was then imprisoned in the Tower, arriving the very night that her husband Henry V was murdered by the victorious Yorkist king. With the death of her husband and son, Margaret was no longer a political force and after a few months in the Tower Edward IV turned her over to the custody of her friend, the Countess of Suffolk at Wallingford.
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Margaret appears to have borne her imprisonment and may have found some comfort in being lodged with her greatest friend.

In August 1475, Edward IV set out to invade France. At a meeting with Louis XI at Picquigny on 25 August 1475, it was agreed that there would be a nine-year truce between the two countries and that Louis would pay Edward a pension.
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A further condition of the treaty was that Louis would ransom Margaret for 50,000 crowns. In late January 1476, Margaret sailed for France, landing in Dieppe. Margaret’s feelings about her release are unrecorded although it is possible that she was glad to see the back of a country which held such unhappy memories. Margaret travelled to meet Louis’s envoys at Rouen where she was made to renounce all her claims to Anjou and Maine as compensation for the ransom Louis had paid for her.
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Margaret was given a modest pension by her father and was allowed to live in his castle at Reculee. In July 1480, her father died and Margaret found herself entirely dependent on Louis XI. She died in misery and poverty on 25 August 1482 at Dampierre Castle, leaving her few poor possessions to Louis XI.

Margaret of Anjou was forced by necessity to take on an extraordinary role for a medieval queen. Through adverse circumstances, she found herself the leader of a political faction and a military commander. There is no evidence that Margaret ever desired this role; she was motivated by concern for her son throughout. Despite this, Margaret was a hated figure in her own lifetime and has been criticised ever since. There is no doubt that Margaret helped to prolong a war that was already lost and that her actions often did not help her own cause. She was proud, domineering and bloodthirsty at times although much of what made her disliked was forced upon her by the weakness of her husband and his rule. Furthermore there is no doubt that she was the victim of Yorkist propaganda and as she rose to prominence with the growing weakness of Henry VI she was increasingly vilified. To the male propaganda writers, writing to a mostly male audience, Margaret must have made an easy target and as a powerful woman there was no shortage of people prepared to believe the worst of her. However, Margaret never sought the role she was forced to take and all her actions were on behalf of her only child. The Wars of the Roses, like any civil war, forced people into positions that they would not otherwise have taken and Margaret was forced to compromise her reputation for the sake of her child. Margaret of Anjou lived during a difficult period of English history and much of her unpopularity was due to the circumstances in which she found herself. This is very similar to the position of her successor, the first Yorkist queen, Elizabeth Woodville, who was also the victim of propaganda and rumours both from the Lancastrian faction and, more damagingly, the Yorkist side.

Elizabeth Woodville is remembered today as the mother of the princes in the Tower. She is often viewed as a tragic figure. Accounts of her life generally bear out the suggestion that she somehow caused her misfortune through her actions – that it was her own greed and ambition which led to the destruction of her family. With the exception of King John’s first wife, the ineffectual Isabella of Gloucester, Elizabeth Woodville was the first English queen of the post-conquest period. Her marriage caused a huge stir in England and throughout her lifetime Elizabeth Woodville was dogged by scandal. To many of her contemporaries it was unthinkable that the king would have freely chosen to marry a woman so far beneath him and there were rumours of witchcraft and seduction which marred Elizabeth’s reputation both during her lifetime and afterwards. Elizabeth’s detractors were simply unable to believe that the couple could have been motivated only by love and this criticism of Elizabeth was something that her greatest enemy, Richard III, was happy to publicise during his reign. Elizabeth Woodville’s life was one of great extremes, punctuated by triumph and despair. Her contemporaries believed that she simply overreached herself, causing her position to topple once her protector was dead. In reality, however, as an English queen without a powerful foreign family, when her husband died she was left helpless, an easy target for her political rivals.

Elizabeth Woodville was born in 1437 and was the daughter of Sir John Woodville and his wife, Jacquetta de St Pol, Duchess of Bedford.
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The marriage of Elizabeth’s own parents had caused a great scandal across Europe. Jacquetta was the daughter of the Count of St Pol, one of the greatest noblemen in Luxembourg. She was a descendant of Charlemagne and was married in 1433 to John, Duke of Bedford, the younger brother of Henry V. However the Duke of Bedford did not long survive his wedding, leaving Jacquetta a widow two years later. No one would have seriously thought that the Duchess of Bedford would remain single for long but she stunned all her contemporaries when she married Sir John Woodville, a member of her husband’s household and a man vastly beneath her in status. In spite of this, her second marriage appears to have been happy and she bore John thirteen children, of whom Elizabeth Woodville was the eldest.

Little evidence survives pertaining to Elizabeth’s childhood, although Thomas Moore claimed that she had been in the service of Margaret of Anjou during her youth.
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By the mid 1450s, she was married to Sir John Grey. The couple probably lived at Grey’s manor at Astley in Warwickshire and had two children, Thomas born around 1455 and Richard in the late 1450s.
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Grey was an eldest son and a good match for Elizabeth and they may have been happy together. The marriage was destined to be short-lived however and on 17 February 1461, Sir John Grey was killed fighting for the Lancastrians at the second battle of St Albans.
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The death of her husband must have been a major blow for Elizabeth and she probably feared for the future. A further blow was dealt a few weeks later when her father and eldest brother were captured by the Yorkists fighting for the Lancastrians at Towton.
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Following these disasters, Elizabeth returned to her mother at Grafton with her two young sons. The defeat of the Lancastrians at Towton also left Elizabeth in considerable financial straits due to the ensuing confiscation of her Lancastrian family’s estates. At some point, following her return home, she devised a way to present a petition to Edward IV whilst he was hunting in the area.
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According to some reports, she positioned herself under an oak tree with her sons. Elizabeth Woodville was very beautiful and Edward fell in love with her at first sight.

Elizabeth’s contemporary, Dominic Mancini wrote that marriage was not the first thing which Edward had on his mind when he fell for the young widow:

When he first saw her, Edward wanted Elizabeth to be his mistress. This was a position of honour in medieval England and he must have been surprised at her refusal, perhaps even resorting to threatening rape with a dagger. Elizabeth, however, as the daughter of the Duchess of Bedford, considered the status of royal mistress beneath her own, apparently saying ‘that as she wist herself too simple to be his wife, so thought she herself too good to be his concubine’.
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It seems unlikely that Elizabeth considered marriage a possibility at the beginning of her relationship with Edward but she may have hoped to gain the return of her husband’s estates through his infatuation with her. She must have been surprised and flattered when it became clear that Edward wished to marry her.

The exact date and location of Elizabeth’s second marriage is unknown, although it may have been on 1 May 1464.
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It appears to have been an impulsive move and both were forced to keep it secret for some time. Elizabeth was the first English woman to marry the king since the Norman conquest and both Elizabeth and Edward must have realised that it would cause consternation in England. Edward may have not considered the consequences of the marriage properly. It was inappropriate and was later used to bolster accusations of witchcraft against Elizabeth and her mother. Edward had also not seen fit to inform his most powerful magnate, the Earl of Warwick, who was in France arranging a marriage between Edward and the sister-in-law of the King of France.
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Following Warwick’s return, Edward was forced to admit at a council meeting that he was, in fact, already married and had been for some time.

When news of Elizabeth and Edward’s marriage was made public, there was universal disapproval. Edward’s mother, Cecily Neville, apparently objected that Elizabeth was not good enough for him.
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She is also supposed to have claimed that he was not the son of her husband, the Duke of York but instead the result of an adulterous affair.
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Whilst this appears merely to have been an impulsive statement made by the irate duchess, the comment sowed a seed that would bear fruit nearly twenty years later. Edward’s brother, George, Duke of Clarence also objected to the marriage, saying that Edward should have married a virgin, rather than a widow with children.
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By far the most serious opponent to the match was Warwick who was angered at the failure of his marriage negotiations in France. The secret marriage of Edward and Elizabeth caused a rift between Edward and Warwick which eventually resulted in open war between them.