Blood Sisters (17 page)

But Elizabeth’s role on this journey was not purely domestic and maternal: at Hereford, for example, she and the prince presided over the trials of those responsible for the recent disorder. Again, when the little Prince of Wales was sent to visit Coventry Elizabeth could be found making friendly overtures to the city officers. Her letter assured them that a servant of her husband’s who had made an affray there would receive no special treatment: ‘for as much as you shall now certainly understand that we do not intend in any way to maintain, support, or favour any of my said lord’s servants or ours in any of their riots or unfitting behaviour …’. Gifts were offered, too: ‘Memorandum that our sovereign lady, the queen, has given to the mayor and his worshipful brethren and to the mayoress and her sisters twelve bucks … six of the said bucks to the said mayor and his brethren, and the other six of them to their said wives …’ Elizabeth and her husband had always been mindful of the usefulness of women. The
Great Chronicle of London
relates how Edward, raising money for his wars, kissed an old lady to such effect that she upped her
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20; and his welcome into London after the Readeption was said by Commynes to be in part due to the ‘ladies of quality and rich citizens’ wives with whom he had formerly intrigued’, and who persuaded their husbands to declare for his side.

Mindfulness, of course, could go too far – from a wife’s viewpoint, anyway. Edward was happy to take the freedoms the age accorded to any wealthy husband, never mind a king, and avail himself of the services of mistresses. Elizabeth, especially given the frequency of her pregnancies and retreats into confinement, must up to a point have accepted this situation. But around this time Edward began a liaison that would become a matter of comment in the next reigns for its personal qualities, as well as its capacity for use in political propaganda – his affair with ‘Jane’ Shore, as the ‘goldsmith’s wife’ is usually known. (Her real name was Elizabeth.) And yet these might be called the golden years for the Yorkist monarchy – for the queen as much as for Edward. Their second son, Richard, was born on 17 August 1473 at the Dominican Friary in Shrewsbury.

Nevertheless, the rifts that had caused the Readeption were still evident. There had been rumours of troubles ahead. In February 1472, soon after Edward’s resumption of the throne, Sir John Paston had written that the king and queen, with Clarence and Gloucester, had gone to Elizabeth’s own palace of Sheen: ‘men say not all in charity; what will fall men cannot say’.

George of Clarence and Richard of Gloucester had recently been on different sides of a deadly dispute, but now they had a new cause of enmity. The death of Edward of Lancaster, Marguerite’s son, had left his young wife Anne Neville a widow – and potentially a hugely wealthy one. Warwick’s treason and death meant that his estates reverted to the crown; it seemed likely (though illegal) that his wife’s huge Beauchamp and Despenser inheritance would also be taken from her. Clarence’s wife Isabel was to be the first beneficiary. Her sister Anne might also benefit – and, coincidentally or not, Richard now desired to marry her.

Clarence had no wish to see his brother share the bounty. The Crowland chronicler claimed that Clarence spirited Anne away to a house in London, disguised as a kitchen maid.
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Richard, discovering her whereabouts, moved her to sanctuary at the College of St Martin-le-Grand while a deal was thrashed out. In April 1472 papal dispensation was granted for two such close connections to marry; Richard had already had a clause put into the contracts assuring him of Anne’s inheritance even if the dispensation failed to arrive.
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It is not known exactly when or where the ceremony took place, but marry they did and with the support of Edward. After Clarence’s recent treachery the king can have had no desire to see so much wealth and power concentrated in that brother’s hands. It seems that the queen approved too, for in the preceding months she had made a point of renewing a grant Richard held from her.

None of the reports hint at Anne’s feelings, unless it is that of the Milanese ambassador in France. Some time later, in February 1474, he sent a patchily erroneous account of enmity between Richard, who ‘by force has taken to wife a daughter of the late Earl of Warwick’, and Clarence, who feared this might deprive him of ‘Warwick’s county’. The ‘force’, of course, may mean that it was against Clarence’s will rather than against Anne’s. Indeed, she may not have wanted any other choices.
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Anne and Richard had known each other as children: between 1465 and 1468 Richard had received part of his upbringing in Warwick’s castle at Middleham in Yorkshire, so it is conceivable there was an element of affection involved. The early seventeenth-century antiquary George Buck,
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indeed, has Richard desisting from taking any part in the killing of Anne’s first husband, Edward, ‘in regard of this prince’s wife, who … was akin to the Duchess of York his mother, and whom also he loved very affectionately, though secretly’. Richard’s later demonisation owes much to his enemies’ propaganda, perpetuated by Shakespeare. Nothing for which evidence exists – his prowess in battle, for example – suggests that there was anything about Richard that would have turned a prospective bride away.

But even if there were affection between Richard and Anne, it would not have been considered important. This was a matter of property. John Paston reported that Clarence told Richard ‘he may well have my lady his sister-in-law, but they shall divide no livelihood’. If so, Richard was clearly uninterested in the lady without her lands.

With the royal brothers squabbling over the Neville estates, one woman was certainly robbed – Anne’s and Isabel’s mother the Countess of Warwick, who after her husband’s death had fled to Beaulieu Abbey, only to find that on the king’s orders she was not permitted to leave. The appalled widow wrote pleading letters (in her own hand … ‘in the absence of clerks’) not only to the king and to her sons-in-law themselves but to ‘the Queen’s good Grace, to my right redoubted Lady the King’s mother, to my Lady the King’s eldest daughter [the six-year-old Elizabeth] … to my Ladies the King’s sisters, to my Lady of Bedford mother to the Queen, and to other Ladies noble of the realm’. But on this occasion, the female network was powerless. In June 1473 the countess was taken north to Middleham, now the property of her new son-in-law. Rous
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describes her as being ‘locked up’, and by Anne as much as by Richard. Her lands were to be shared out, in the chilling words of an Act of Parliament of May 1474, as though ‘she were naturally dead’.

Middleham was a Norman keep, substantially modernised and now impressive enough to earn the sobriquet the ‘Windsor of the North’. The medieval age did not distinguish between castles and houses – by this point houses were often being built with purely decorative crenellation, and moats were being converted into lakes. But Middleham was still a fully functional fortress. Northern houses were more likely to be used for genuine defence, close as they were to Scotland and England’s only land frontier.

Anne’s only child, Edward ‘of Middleham’, was born there in 1473, some accounts suggest, or possibly in 1476 or 1477, just before the first definite record of his existence – cited as to be prayed for, along with his parents, in a chantry. A huge number of question marks also hang over Anne – more than over any other woman in this story. Rous says she and Richard were ‘unhappily married’, but there is little other evidence and ‘unhappily’ here may simply mean that it ended unfortunately. Still, to modern eyes there is something worrying in Anne’s absence from the records, even by the standards of a fifteenth-century wife. In order to create a power base for himself, Richard needed to make use of his wife’s heritage and lineage – to present himself as the legitimate inheritor of Neville authority in the north. But perhaps that need made him all the more determined to limit her autonomy.

While Anne, and her fortune, were thus absorbed into the Yorkist structure, Margaret Beaufort had been working towards her own rehabilitation. Her husband Stafford had died in October 1471 of wounds he received at the battle of Barnet some months earlier, and within eight months she had married again.

She had, it seems, been fond of Stafford – they celebrated their wedding anniversaries, feasting on plovers and larks, sharing pleasures as well as property. If Edmund Tudor had been the father of her child, it was Stafford whose favourite house, in later years, she would painstakingly rebuild. But after his death she had for a short time moved out of Woking into the London home owned by her mother – perhaps because she needed to put herself visibly in the marketplace again.

With her absent son’s interests to protect, her Beaufort relatives dead or disgraced, her own reputation lately tarnished with disloyalty, Margaret could not afford to remain unprotected. We cannot know for sure at what point Margaret Beaufort really did start to shape her own destiny – the records of her business affairs do not distinguish between her own decisions and those of a husband until much later in her life – but surely we may speculate that it was now. The leading Beauforts had all been executed – so there was only the king who might be expected to exercise direct control over her affairs; and Edward must have been only too glad to see her married to a man who seemed wholly reconciled to the Yorkist monarchy. Margaret’s third (or, technically, fourth) marriage would be a matter of business sealed by elaborate contracts that would later be to some degree dissolved, by mutual consent, when need no longer required and opportunity offered. None the less in its own terms it was a success story, with every sign that this husband respected his wife’s abilities.

Thomas, Lord Stanley, a hard-headed man of property, was distinguished chiefly for having avoided firm commitment to either side. He was therefore not wholly trusted; all the same, at this juncture he had achieved the position of lord steward of Edward IV’s household, and had moreover forged connections through marriage with the Woodville family. A widower, already with children, he was content with the fact that no children would come from his marriage with Margaret. She, however, increased his status, while his position within the Yorkist regime fostered her security and that of her son Henry.

When they had fled England Jasper and Henry’s ship, steering for France, had been forced by storms to make instead for the duchy of Brittany, further west. There Duke Francis received them courteously as guests, but in reality they were bargaining counters and were not permitted to leave. Both the French king and Edward in England had tried to negotiate them out of Breton hands, Edward being convinced (Polydore Vergil says) that with the two Tudors on the continent he could never live ‘in perfect security’. But Duke Francis had refused and there, for the moment, the matter rested, while Margaret went on consolidating her policy of reconciliation.

When Edward invaded France in 1475, in pursuance of England’s long-standing claim to the French crown, Margaret Beaufort’s husband Stanley was one of the accompanying lords selected to negotiate the resulting treaty. But the French expedition marked a significant point for another woman too. Before he left for France Edward brought his young heir back from Ludlow as nominal ruler with the title Keeper of the Realm, under his mother’s charge. The will the king made before his campaign acknowledged Elizabeth’s importance. His two eldest daughters were to have 10,000 marks each as a marriage dowry so long as ‘they be governed and ruled in their marriages by our dearest wife the Queen and by our said son the Prince, if God fortune him to come to age of discretion’; if they should marry themselves ‘so as they be thereby disparaged, as God forbid’, the dowry was forfeit. His third daughter, Cecily, was to receive 18,000 marks (on top of 2000 already paid), but then her marriage to the heir of the king of Scots had already been arranged so as to secure the Scottish border before the army went to combat the French. The York lands were to go to his younger son, Richard; the queen herself was to have the revenues of all the lands she already possessed for her lifetime, and her personal property to dispose of as she would: ‘all her own goods, chattels, stuff, bedding, arrases, tapestries, verdours, stuff of household plate and jewels, and all other things which she now hath and occupieth’. She was named first of his ten executors: ‘our said dearest and most entirely beloved wife Elizabeth the Queen … our said dearest Wife in whom we most singularly put our trust in this party’.

Elizabeth was granted £4400 a year for the maintenance of the king’s household that she and her son would now occupy. She was not in any sense given a regency of the kind that was well known in France, the kind Marguerite had sought. This was probably partly down to the memory of Marguerite, partly to the lack of recent precedent, and perhaps partly also to personality. Perhaps Edward felt that Elizabeth’s talents were more suited to protecting the interests of her children, and to handling her and their property, than to ruling a country. All the same, it was a declaration of trust.
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The invasion of France had been planned in alliance with its neighbour and traditional rival Burgundy, and Margaret of Burgundy had rushed to see her brothers Edward and Richard as they landed. In the event – to the annoyance of the more militant Richard – Edward was easily persuaded to accept a peace treaty and a pension from the French, rather than pursue his claims to their throne. Margaret now had to mediate between her brother and her husband, the duke having been deprived of England’s aid against their common enemy.

Commynes described the rulers of England and France meeting on a bridge and embracing through a grating. Louis joked that if Edward wanted to come and meet the French ladies he would lend him the Cardinal of Bourbon for his confessor ‘who he knew would willingly absolve him, if he should commit any sin by way of love and gallantry’. The peace was cemented not only by that pension for Edward, but by the promise of a marriage between young Princess Elizabeth and the Dauphin. ‘Also for the inviolate observation of the friendship, it is promised, settled, agreed, and concluded that a marriage shall be contracted between the most illustrious Prince Charles, son of the most powerful prince of France, and the most serene lady Elizabeth, daughter of the most invincible king of England, when they shall reach marriageable years… .’ Edward returned to his delighted capital calling his eldest daughter ‘Dauphiness’ and declaring that she must have a new wardrobe in the French style. And as one daughter prepared to depart, another arrived: a fifth girl, Anne (probably named for Anne Mortimer, through whom came Edward’s best claim to the throne), was born to the royal couple on 2 November that year.