Blood Sisters (16 page)
Authors: Sarah Gristwood
Henry VI, Marguerite’s husband, now died too – in the Tower and in Yorkist custody. The
Arrivall
says he died of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’; others, including Fabian and Commynes, say he was killed by Richard. As he struck the fatal blow, the eighteen-year-old Duke of Gloucester is supposed to have said: ‘Now there is no heir male of King Edward the Third but we of the House of York!’ There is no hard evidence for Richard’s involvement, let alone his words, but if they were indeed uttered he was ignoring Margaret Beaufort’s son Henry Tudor, possibly because of the legitimation issue or because of doubts about the validity of a claim passed through a woman. But one thing is certain: with no son or husband to promote, Marguerite would now have been considered irrelevant.
She was found three days later, the
Arrivall
reports, ‘in a poor religious place, where she had hidden herself, for the security of her person’. She appears to have hidden Anne, too: a list of those taken and presented to the king included ‘Lady Margaret, Queen, Lady Anne, Princess’. Whether or not Anne felt personal loss at her husband’s death, as an example of the turning of Fortune’s wheel her past year had been close to unrivalled. She now passed into the charge of her brother-in-law Clarence, who had been pardoned by his brother the king. Crowland reports that when Edward made his triumphal entry into London Marguerite was ‘borne in a carriage before the king’, as the Roman emperor would have done to Shakespeare’s Cleopatra. The last few days had brought the loss of those closest to her and the wreck of all her hopes; but, in keeping with the treatment generally accorded to women in these wars, she suffered no more direct penalty.
Marguerite’s father wrote to her with his hope that God might help her with His counsels, ‘For rarely is the aid of man tendered in such a reverse of fortune.’ Edward IV’s records show payment to one Bawder Herman ‘for the expenses and daily allowances to Margaret, lately called the Queen, and to other persons attendant upon the said Queen’. After her first few months of confinement Marguerite was moved to the kindly custody of her old friend Alice Chaucer, the dowager Duchess of Suffolk, at Wallingford, who was paid five marks a week for her expenses. She was probably even freed to some degree: in 1475 she joined the London Skinners’ Fraternity of the Assumption of the Virgin, on the same occasion as two of Elizabeth Woodville’s ladies; the queen herself was already a member. Marguerite was, in other words, accepted back – if she had ever left them – into the networks of aristocratic women; and by men accorded the half patronising, half chivalric courtesy seen time and again in the treatment of ladies.
The Lancastrian ‘Readeption’, as the Lancastrians themselves called Henry VI’s brief second reign, was over barely six months after it had begun. This time – for this branch of the family – there would be no coming back. As one contemporary put it: ‘And so no one from that stock remained among the living who could claim the crown.’ Except, posterity would add, for Margaret Beaufort and any heirs of her body … .
Margaret had shown all too clearly her pleasure in that brief restoration of the Lancastrian dynasty. That she did not suffer any penalty is due to the actions of her husband. When Edward re-entered London, Stafford had been there to welcome him; at Barnet, where Warwick was killed, Stafford had been badly wounded fighting for Edward’s army. In the last week of March Margaret’s cousin Somerset, having taken on his dead brother’s role as a prominent Lancastrian leader, had visited Woking in an attempt to persuade Stafford to fight for their cause, but in vain. After Tewkesbury, this latest inheritor of the Somerset title had been dragged out of sanctuary and killed: evidence of Edward’s determination and ruthlessness that Margaret would have taken seriously.
Jasper and Henry Tudor had been in Wales when they heard of the disaster that had overtaken the Lancastrians. Jasper would have had no option but to flee abroad: Bernard André says it was Margaret who begged him to take her young son Henry too. With the deaths of Henry VI and his son, Henry Tudor had suddenly assumed a dangerous importance: he was the only Lancastrian heir (even if not all his contemporaries admitted it) since his mother was simultaneously disabled and protected by her gender. It would be fourteen years before Margaret saw her son again.
Clarence and Gloucester, love my lovely queen,
And kiss your princely nephew, brothers both.
Henry VI Part 3
, 5.7
As the Yorkists returned to power, the Lancastrian threat, it seemed, had finally been eliminated. From now on, the only challenge would come from within. The years ahead would prove it was indeed a serious threat – but there was little sign of that in the summer of 1471. When the infant Edward, Elizabeth Woodville’s long-awaited son, was created Prince of Wales at the end of June it was a symbol that this time the Yorkists intended to stay.
Just as significant, perhaps, was the fact that Queen Elizabeth was head of the little prince’s council and that all the others named – the king’s brothers Clarence and Gloucester, the queen’s brother Anthony Woodville, the leading bishops – were given power to advise and counsel him ‘with the express consent of the Queen’. That September king and queen went on pilgrimage to Canterbury, a favourite place, and at Christmas in Westminster they took care to display themselves going to mass in the Abbey ‘wearing their crowns’, though for the Twelfth Night procession Elizabeth went uncrowned ‘because she was great with child’. This child, Margaret, was to die before the end of the year – a year which also saw the death of Elizabeth’s mother Jacquetta on 30 May. Joy, therefore, was mixed with sorrow; but in her public capacity, Elizabeth was riding high.
The
Liber Niger
or ‘Black Book’ of Edward IV, compiled between summer 1471 and autumn 1472, was intended to implement much-needed economies in the royal household. None the less it described an impressive edifice divided into two principal departments, the
domus providencie
(kitchens, buttery, laundry and so on) and the
domus magnificencie
(chapel, signet office, wardrobes, and knights and esquires of the body). The queen’s household was on a smaller scale and would have included far more women. Even so, Elizabeth too had grooms and kitchen staff, clerks, auditors, carvers, almoners, attorneys who served on her council, butlers, bakers, pages and pursuivants, surgeons and squires. Her offices – of course she had offices – at Westminster were in the New Tower, next to the king’s exchequer.
There is a good description, written in 1472, of the pleasure and state in which the royal family lived in their great palaces close to the Thames: Greenwich, Eltham, Westminster, Windsor (so extensively remodelled by Edward III a century before) and Sheen. While Edward had been in exile in Burgundy he had been entertained by Lord Gruuthuyse, whose palace survives in Bruges today. Now it was the restored king’s chance to reciprocate, and the details of the visit the Burgundian nobleman made to the court at Windsor are preserved in the account by a herald, Bluemantle Pursuivant.
After being greeted by the royal couple, and escorted to their chambers, the visiting party were served dinner there, in the company of a number of English officers. Then ‘the King had him to the queen’s chamber, where she had there her ladies playing at the marteaux [a game like bowls], and some of her ladies and gentlewomen at the Closheys [ninepins] of ivory, and Dancing. And some at divers other games, according. The which sight was full pleasant to them. Also the King danced with my lady Elizabeth, his eldest daughter’ – and so they parted for the night.
The next morning came matins and mass in the king’s own chapel, after which Edward gave Lord Gruuthuyse a gold cup embellished with pearls, a huge sapphire and a ‘great piece of a Unicorn’s horn’. After breakfast came hunting; dinner in the lodge; then more hunting, with half a dozen bucks run to death by the castle hounds. ‘By that time it was near night, yet the King showed him his garden, and Vineyard of Pleasure, and so turned into the Castle again, where they heard evensong in their chambers.’
Elizabeth did her part in honouring Gruuthuyse:
The Queen did cause to be ordained a great Banquet in her own chamber. At which Banquet were the King, the Queen, my lady Elizabeth, the King’s eldest daughter, the Duchess of Exeter [the king’s sister Anne], the Lady Rivers, and the Lord Gruthuyse [
sic
], sitting at one mess, and at the same table sat the Duke of Buckingham [and] my lady his wife [Elizabeth Woodville’s sister] with divers other Ladies … . And when they had supped, my lady Elizabeth, the King’s eldest daughter, danced with the Duke of Buckingham, and divers other ladies also. Then about nine of the clock, the King and the Queen, with her ladies and gentlewomen, brought the said Lord Gruthuyse to three chambers of Pleasure, all hanged with white silk and linen cloth, and all the floors covered with carpets. There was ordained a bed for himself, of as good down as could be gotten, the sheets of Reynes, also fine fustians, the counterpoint cloth of gold, furred with ermine, the Tester and the Ceiler also shining cloth of gold, the curtains white sarsenet; as for his head Suit and Pillows, [they] were of the queen’s own ordinance.
The attention that both herald and queen paid to the furnishings is notable (along with the charming description of Lord Gruuthuyse ending a wearing day by lingering in the bath, in company with the lord chamberlain). So too is the way that access to the queen’s chambers was regarded as a privilege in the chivalric style, the chambers themselves presented as a place where monarchy could be seen – or displayed – in its most accessible and human guise.
This was an age when greater privacy was in demand. Great builders such as Edward III, John of Gaunt at Kenilworth and Lord Scrope at Bolton Hall had already started to limit the use of the great hall, once the all-purpose centre of the house, to big public functions. Royalty and noblemen had looked to their peers on the continent for inspiration, daring to require more rooms (even if still multi-functional), privies, fireplaces and chimneys, more painted walls and tiled floors. But what survives now not in buildings but only in illuminated manuscripts is the sheer riot of colour that would have greeted the visitor: on textiles, painted glass, tiles, bright wooden roofs and corbels, to say nothing of clothes and livery.
Wood panelling instead of wall hangings was just coming in, as was translucent glass: a new spirit of luxury and comfort was in the air. Sir John Fastolf’s fifty-room brick castle at Caister could boast feather beds, collections of jewels and plate, an astrolabe in the owner’s bedroom and books in the bathing chamber. Back in 1456, so the Paston letters recorded, Cecily Neville had ‘sore moved’ Sir John to sell her the place, so impressed was she.
1
The great houses also had their gardens; formally enclosed plots with herb beds and rose bowers, lavender and lilies; and half-wild meadows with the sweet scent of elderflower in spring and the soapy smell of may. Smell was important in the medieval world: a sweet odour was one of the signs by which a saint could be identified. Sight, too, was perceived as a way to God. While in winter the occupants of these residences had to make do with images in the chapel (Edward bought a fabulous gold statue of the Virgin, for instance, for the chapel at Windsor), in spring and summer, as they walked on the grass, the blue of columbine might remind them of the Virgin’s robe, the golden heart of a honey-scented oxslip the promise of her heavenly crown. In one work introduced into England around this time the paths through an orchard became an allegorical rendition of a saint’s mystical dialogue with God. At the time of Gruuthuyse’s visit, in autumn, the swelling of fruit on trees and grapes on vines brought its own message of God’s favour, of promise and prosperity.
But there were other, darker symbols too. That same year as Gruuthuyse’s visit, 1472, saw a comet that blazed across the sky for almost two months; no one knew what the portent signified. The next year brought fevers and a bloody diarrhoea, and it was through a troubled landscape that in the spring of 1473 the two-and-a-half-year-old Edward was sent to Ludlow, on the borders of his Welsh principality, with Elizabeth’s brother Anthony destined to be his governor. Anthony was, in Mancini’s words, ‘a kindly, serious and just’ man, both educated and gifted as a military commander; one whose spiritual leanings reputedly led him to wear a hair shirt underneath his courtly garments; and undoubtedly well suited to his task.
Two of Elizabeth’s other brothers were the young prince’s counsellors and another his chaplain, while her son by her first marriage – assisted by her cousin – became his comptroller and her brother-in-law by her first marriage his master of the horse. Abbot Mylling, who had been so kind to Elizabeth in sanctuary, became his chancellor. In the years ahead such a comprehensive placing of Woodville connections about the boy would prove a vulnerable point, giving rise to mistrust among the nobility, but at the time it must have made Elizabeth feel safe. When her son set out for Ludlow she went with him, despite being once again pregnant, and stayed until the autumn.
The instructions his father sent for the rearing of the little prince sound a caring domestic note. He was to rise ‘at a convenient hour according to his age’; hear matins in his chamber and mass in the chapel; then after breakfast ‘to be occupied in such virtuous learning as his age shall suffer to receive’. Every care was to be taken as to his companions and his conversation at dinner, ‘so that the communication at all times in his presence be of virtue, honour, cunning, wisdom, and deed of worship, and of nothing that shall stir him to vice’. No ‘swearer, brawler, backbiter, common hazarder or adulterer’ was even to be admitted to the household. After two more hours of lessons he might ‘be shewed such convenient disports and exercises as belong to his estate to have experience in’; then after evensong those about him were ‘to enforce themselves to make him merry towards his bed’.