The Queen of Last Hopes (40 page)

It is pleasant being an old lady. Take this procession before the day of the royal coronation, for instance. I have been asked to ride in Queen Catherine’s train, but at my age I feel the heat as keenly as the cold, and I know that were I to take part, I would be prostrate for a week. “I would be honored to attend the queen, your grace,” I tell young King Henry. Not quite eighteen, he is tall, handsome, and genial like his grandfather, that fourth Edward. “But my health will not allow it. I must miss this occasion, I fear.”

“Well,” Henry rumbles. “We shall miss you. But why should you miss the procession? You may watch in comfort with my grandmother.”

So on the day of the procession, I do not sit in a litter with the sun beating down upon my poor old head, nor do I sit in my chambers waiting to hear a description of the day’s festivities from my son and daughter, who are in the procession themselves: Nicholas as one of King Henry’s knights, Jane as one of Queen Catherine’s ladies. Instead, I sit on the upper floor of a hired house in Cheapside alongside Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, and watch the procession from the comfort of a well-cushioned chair.

The king’s thirteen-year-old sister, the Lady Mary, is with us as well. My daughter, Jane Guildford, has virtually raised this beautiful girl, who has made it known that when her time comes to marry, she will not budge out of England without her Mother Guildford in her train. “Have you ever seen such a sight?” she breathes as she leans far out the window. She speaks merely of the banners that festoon the street: the procession itself has not even begun.

“It will be but more splendid when it starts, but you will not improve the occasion if you fall out the window,” I said. You see? A younger woman could never say that to a princess.

The Lady Mary obediently takes a somewhat less precarious stance. “You were at my mother’s coronation, weren’t you, Lady Vaux?”

“Indeed I was. And I was at the coronation of my lady Margaret of Anjou as well.”

Mary’s face lights up with curiosity, for Margaret of Anjou is little more than a name to her, the wars of the last century the abstract stuff of her tutors’ lectures. This girl has grown up in an England of peace and prosperity, an England where her father the king died quietly in his bed and where her brother Henry has no one trying to push him off his new throne. For her, Wakefield, St. Albans, Towton, Hexham, Barnet, and Tewkesbury are simply the names of English towns. “That’s right. You served her, didn’t you, Lady Vaux?”

“Until her dying day.”

My lady, so thin and shrunken that I could have carried her from room to room, died in my arms on a hot day in August 1482. She had been in great pain for days, and sometimes I saw that it made her sob into her pillow when she thought no one was watching, but never did I hear her complain or fret. “Rest in peace, my brave lady,” I said as she at last gave up fighting for her last breath while her small household stood by weeping. “All those who loved you are waiting in Paradise, and they have missed you sorely.”

I saw Margaret buried in dignity near her parents at Angers, and then what was there for me in France without my lady? Though William had died under attainder, his estates forfeit to the crown, I had been allowed two manors in England, and my children were living there, so it was to England that I returned. It was ruled, and ruled well, I had to admit, by King Edward.

And then just months after my return to England, King Edward, not yet one-and-forty but given to overindulgence and not the fine figure he’d cut at Tewkesbury, died after a chill that went to his lungs. He had survived my own dear lady by just eight months. As all of Europe watched, amazed, Edward’s younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, the one all had thought most loyal, snatched the throne from his brother’s twelve-year-old son, Edward V. Just over two years later, this Gloucester, calling himself Richard III, having destroyed his brother’s friends and relations and his brother’s sons, destroyed himself. For on August 22, 1485, nearly three years to the day after my lady breathed her last in Dampierre, the impoverished, exiled Henry Tudor, aided by the Earl of Oxford, defeated and killed Richard III in a battle no one had thought Henry would win. Sharing his victory on the field that day were my son and Charles Somerset, the son of my lady’s beloved Hal.

A few months later, the houses of Lancaster and York were at last joined as the new king, Henry VII, married Edward’s oldest daughter, Elizabeth of York. With their union ended my own family’s poverty, for the Tudors did not forget the friends of Henry VI—or of his queen. Within weeks of Henry VII’s victory, Nicholas was restored to my husband’s lands, and he and my daughter were called to court. And now with the death of Henry VII, they will be serving this handsome new King Henry and his queen, both of whom have clearly captured the Londoners’ hearts.

“Was Queen Margaret as pretty as Queen Catherine when she processed through London?”

Prettier, I must admit, but this is not something even the license of the old will allow me to say aloud. “She was beautiful. Her blond hair was combed down around her shoulders, and she was dressed in white damask powdered with gold. And she loved her king and loved the idea of bringing peace to England through her marriage, so she glowed with happiness and pride.”

Mary gives a romantic sigh.

And twenty-six years later, they paraded her through the streets like a common whore while the crowd threw dung at her, days after she had lost her only child
. Needless to say, I do not voice this addendum aloud. But perhaps Margaret Beaufort guesses my thoughts, for she says sternly, “Fortune is fickle. Remember that, Mary.”

“Yes, Grandmother,” Mary says dutifully, and pokes her neck out the window again. “Harry is coming!”

The king, preceded by the great-grandson of the Duke of Buckingham who died at Northampton, is indeed coming down Cheapside, splendidly clad in red velvet and cloth of gold. But for all of his magnificence, he is, after all, only Mary’s brother, and she soon draws in her head again.

Then, at last, comes the sight that Mary and every other young girl in London has been waiting to see: Queen Catherine, a princess of the House of Aragon. Shimmering in white, her auburn hair flowing loose, she is smiling and waving to the crowd as she passes down the broad lane of Cheapside, her entire life before her. And then I see in my mind’s eye the lovely French princess who rode down this same street four-and-sixty years ago, and a tear rolls down my wrinkled cheek.

Katherine Vaux was still alive on June 28, 1509, when the young Henry VIII granted her an annuity, though I have taken artistic license in having her watch his pre-coronation procession in the company of Margaret Beaufort and Mary Tudor (who did indeed watch it from a hired house in Cheapside). The date of Katherine’s death is unknown, but she first appears in Margaret’s records as one of her damsels in 1452 and must have been at least well into her sixties when she died. Katherine was survived by her children, Nicholas and Jane. Nicholas served both Henry VII and Henry VIII militarily and administratively and was made Lieutenant of Guînes. Jane is best known as the aged “Mother Guildford” who accompanied Henry VIII’s sister Mary Tudor to her marriage to the ailing French king Louis XII. The king, believing that the overprotective Jane was interfering with his fun with his young bride, sent Jane home, where she received a large annuity from Henry VIII as consolation.

Charles Somerset, the natural son of Henry Beaufort, fought for Henry VII at the Battle of Bosworth. (He was originally named Charles Beaufort and took the name Somerset when Henry VII became king; I declined to bore the reader with this detail.) He served Henry VII and Henry VIII as a soldier, a diplomat, and an administrator; the magnificence of Henry VIII’s famous Field of the Cloth of Gold was largely a product of Charles’s organizational flair. Somerset was made the Earl of Worcester by Henry VIII in 1514. The present-day Dukes of Beaufort are his descendants.

Joan Hill, Henry Beaufort’s mistress and Charles’s mother, was still living in 1493, when Henry VII granted her an annuity, but nothing else seems to be known about her. I have therefore invented the details of her background.

John Fortescue and John Morton each made their peace with Edward IV after Tewkesbury. Fortescue died in 1479, having written several influential treatises on political theory. John Morton was made Bishop of Ely during Edward IV’s reign. He was heavily involved in efforts to remove Richard III from power and became Archbishop of Canterbury during Henry VII’s reign.

The tombs of Margaret of Anjou’s parents in Angers Cathedral were destroyed during the French Revolution, although René’s skeletal remains were found in his coffin and photographed in 1895. Margaret’s remains were not located. A plaque inside the cathedral commemorates her and her family. Edward of Lancaster’s approximate resting place is marked by a plaque in the choir of Tewkesbury Abbey.

Not long after Henry VI’s burial in Chertsey, pilgrims begin to flock to his tomb, and a number of miracles were soon attributed to the late king’s intervention, In 1484, Richard III ordered that Henry VI’s body be reburied in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, where it rests today. Various motives have been given for this decision, such as remorse for his alleged role in the king’s death, a desire to associate himself with the cult of sainthood that had grown up around Henry, or a wish to benefit the chapel, which could hope to reap profits from pilgrim visits. Later, Henry VII attempted to have Henry VI canonized, but his efforts to do so did not outlive his own reign.

***

In
The Queen of Last Hopes
I have taken one great historical liberty: that of making Henry Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, the lover of Margaret of Anjou. It was rumored in 1461 that Margaret had poisoned her husband and intended to “unite with” Somerset, but otherwise there is no indication of a romantic relationship between the pair at that or at any other time, and the gossip that Margaret poisoned Henry was clearly false. As my novel progressed, though, I found the characters gravitating in the direction of an affair, and it seemed to me that if Margaret could have ever been tempted into adultery, Henry Beaufort, whom contemporaries found handsome and charismatic, was the one man who could have done so, especially after he eliminated Margaret’s enemy the Duke of York at Wakefield. Nonetheless, the relationship that I portray between the two of them here is the product of my imagination. Henry Beaufort did abruptly abandon the Lancastrian cause, then return to it a year later at the cost of his life. During his brief career as a Yorkist, he jousted wearing “a sorry hat of straw.”

I do want to emphasize also that there is no historical basis, other than contemporary gossip and Yorkist propaganda, to support the claim that Edward of Lancaster was illegitimate. Henry VI spent the time during which Edward would have been conceived at Margaret’s manor of Greenwich. He was sane at the time of his son’s conception and during the period that Margaret’s pregnancy would have first become readily apparent. During this time, he showed himself to be pleased with Margaret: he granted an annuity to the man who brought him news of the pregnancy, spent two hundred pounds on a girdle known as a demiceint for the queen, and gave her a generous grant of land. Presented with his child following his recovery from madness, he is recorded in a private letter to John Paston as having held up his hands and thanked God. None of this suggests that he believed the child to be another man’s.

One source, however, has been cited by those who have taken at face value the rumors of Edward’s illegitimacy. Prospero di Camulio, the Milanese ambassador in France, reported to the Duke of Milan on March 27, 1461, that Henry had remarked that Edward of Lancaster “must be the son of the Holy Spirit.” What writers who latch onto this tasty morsel of hearsay almost never quote is the rest of Camulio’s sentence: “but these may only be the words of common fanatics, such as they have at present in that island.” Certainly the timing of this gossip, circulating just weeks after Edward IV had taken the throne—and more than seven years after Edward of Lancaster’s birth—should make us suspicious, as it did Camulio. Sexual slander has long been used against women who take power, and the Yorkists missed no opportunity to smear Margaret’s reputation as she took an increasingly active role in English affairs.

Margaret did indeed take eight years following her marriage to conceive her only child, which has been viewed by some as evidence that some man other than Henry had to have been the father. Given that we know nothing of Margaret’s gynecological history and that there is no indication that Henry was unable to function in bed prior to his madness, however, it seems most fair that we give the couple—and Edward of Lancaster—the benefit of the doubt.

Those who are familiar with Shakespeare’s plays will recall that the Bard presents Suffolk and Margaret as being lovers. There is no historical basis for this portrayal of the pair; the first reference to such a relationship is by the sixteenth-century chronicler Edward Hall, and that is merely in the form of a throwaway description of Suffolk as the “queen’s darling.” Though for dramatic purposes I allowed rumors about Suffolk’s and Margaret’s relationship to circulate in 1450, there is no indication that such rumors actually were current at that time.

Was Henry VI murdered? The official account of the events of 1471 reported that he died of “pure displeasure and melancholy,” but other contemporary sources attribute his death to human hands, as do most modern historians. The involvement of Richard, Duke of Gloucester in Henry’s death was hinted at by the chronicler Warkworth, and the Tudors elaborated upon the story with gusto, but there is no proof that Richard was in fact the killer. Any order to murder the defeated king, however, would have been given by Edward IV, and his loyal youngest brother would have been a reasonable choice for the task.

Henry VI’s mental state after he recovered from his stupor of 1453 to 1454 is difficult to assess. He does not seem to have ever been completely incapacitated again, but he apparently was dependent on others to make major decisions and might well have been quite fragile. His injury at the first Battle of St. Albans, his capture by the Yorkists after the Battle of Northampton, and his imprisonment from 1465 onward cannot have helped him mentally, but objective accounts of his condition after 1454 are hard to come by. Notably, when Henry was restored to his throne in 1470, it seems to have been taken for granted by all concerned that he would be a mere figurehead.

Whether the Duke of Suffolk’s murder was the spontaneous act of the seamen who happened across his ship, or whether more powerful forces were behind the killing, is unknown. As Roger Virgoe pointed out in an article, “The Death of William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk,” Henry VI’s government seems to have believed that York or his agents were behind the murder of the duke and the other unrest during 1450, and an indictment against some of the men accused of the murder makes reference to “another person then outside the kingdom” whom the defendants intended to make king. Certainly it is possible that Margaret viewed York as the instigator of the violent events of 1450.

Though Margaret’s two encounters with robbers after Northampton and after Norham may seem like one too many, each is attested to by contemporary chronicles, with some variations as to time and place. A man named only as “Black Jack” was executed with Henry Beaufort following the Battle of Hexham, but his identification as one of the men who robbed Margaret after the failed siege of Norham is my invention, as none of the robbers in that episode are named in the chronicles. Margaret’s shipwreck was also widely recounted by her contemporaries.

There is debate as to the age of the chalk figure of the Cerne Giant, the “rude man” that Edward and Anne see while staying at Cerne Abbey. Though some claim that that the figure could date back to ancient times, there is no written reference to it before 1694. It seemed a shame, however, to deprive Edward and Anne of seeing it.

The letters from Henry Beaufort and Jasper Tudor to Margaret are fictitious; the letter of William de la Pole to his son is genuine and can be found in the Paston letters. The poems in the novel are also authentic (albeit with modernized spelling), although there is some question as to whether Suffolk wrote the poem attributed to him and as to whether René of Anjou was the author of “Regnault and Jehanneton.” René was certainly the author of
Le Livre du Cuers
d’Amours Espris
(translated into English by Stephanie Gibbs and Kathryn Karczewska as
The Book of the Love-Smitten Heart
), which, as Margaret says, includes in its exquisite illuminations a depiction of Lady Hope, who wears a crown. There is no evidence that René intended this figure to represent his daughter Margaret, but it is pleasant to think that he might have meant it as a fatherly tribute to his daughter’s indomitable spirit.

Andrew Trollope was killed at Towton, but the story of Henry Beaufort cutting his throat to spare him from a lingering death is my invention. I have followed the suggestion of C. A. J. Armstrong in his article “Politics and the Battle of St. Albans” that Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, was targeted for assassination by the Duke of York and his followers rather than simply happening to die in battle.

Some readers may object that I have understated the atrocities perpetrated by Margaret’s army on its march south from Wakefield. As B. M. Cron has noted, however, the stories that the Lancastrian army pillaged, plundered, razed, and raped its way toward London are “strong on rhetoric but short on detail”; they are also strongly rooted in Yorkist propaganda and in southern prejudice against the “northern men” of Margaret’s army. Hard evidence of the havoc that such large-scale destruction would have wreaked is markedly lacking, as Cron pointed out. Significantly, it was Margaret’s failure to be ruthless enough—her refusal to march into London after the second battle of St. Albans—that proved to be her undoing in 1461.

Margaret has been much condemned for her role in the executions of Bonville and Kyriell following the second Battle of St. Albans, but it is likely that she regarded the men as traitors to Henry VI, whom they had once served, and therefore deserving of death. Margaret was not present at the battle of Wakefield, contrary to the account by the chronicler Hall, who also depicts the seventeen-year-old Earl of Rutland, most likely slain during the rout, as a pathetic, unarmed twelve-year-old murdered in cold blood. If bloodthirstiness is measured in terms of executions, Margaret’s record pales beside those of the Yorkist commanders: Edward IV is said to have ordered the deaths of more than forty men on the field after Towton; John Neville executed thirty men after Hexham; and Warwick ordered seven men from the Tower to be executed following the Battle of Northampton, despite the fact that the men condemned to death had been holding the Tower on behalf of Henry VI, whom the Yorkists still recognized as king at the time. Edward IV executed a dozen men after the Battle of Tewkesbury after breaking a promise that they would be pardoned. Few of those who have condemned Margaret as cruel and merciless, however, have criticized these killings by her male counterparts.

This brings us in closing to the question of Margaret’s reputation. Smeared first by the Yorkists, then by the Tudors, Margaret has found few defenders until recently, when historians began to reassess her actions and to untangle the historical Margaret from the crazed she-wolf depicted by Shakespeare. Even so, popular culture has lagged behind, and she continues to be depicted unsympathetically by many popular historians and by historical novelists, who grudgingly admit her courage but who condemn her for embroiling the country in civil war on behalf of a losing cause. Yet the Yorkist claim to the throne was far from undisputed, and men of the time were often prepared to resort to violence to uphold their rights: It hardly seems reasonable to expect Margaret and her supporters to have sat back quietly while the boy they and many others regarded as the rightful heir to the throne was shoved aside in favor of York and his progeny. Had Margaret won her dogged fight for the rights of her son and her husband and succeeded in perpetuating the Lancastrian dynasty through her son, she might well be remembered as a heroine. As it is, her cause almost succeeded, and had she lived for just three more years, she would at least have had the satisfaction of seeing her husband’s nephew, Henry Tudor, take the throne as Henry VII.