Читать книгу Blood Sisters: The Hidden Lives of the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses - Sarah Gristwood - Страница 14

If it be fond, call it a woman’s fear;

Which fear, if better reasons can supplant,

I will subscribe, and say I wronged the duke.

Henry VI Part 2, 3.1

When Marguerite arrived in England, her recent acquaintance Cecily was not far behind her. In that autumn of 1445, her husband’s posting in France came to an end; Richard and Cecily returned home and settled down. In May 1446 another daughter, Margaret (the future Margaret of Burgundy), was born to them, probably at Fotheringhay in Northamptonshire, while the two eldest boys were likely to have been given their own establishment, at Ludlow – a normal practice among the aristocracy. But the couple were now embittered and less wealthy, since the English government had never properly covered their expenses in Normandy.

York had hoped to have been appointed for another spell of office but was baulked, not least by Beaufort agency – the cardinal and his nephew Somerset. It was this, one chronicler records, that first sparked the feud between York and the Beauforts, despite the fact that the latter were Cecily’s mother’s family. The Burgundian chronicler Jean de Waurin¹⁶ says also that Somerset ‘was well-liked by the Queen. … She worked on King Henry, on the advice and support of Somerset and other lords and barons of his following, so that the Duke of York was recalled to England. There he was totally stripped of his authority. …’ York now had a long list of grievances, dating back a decade to the time when a sixteen-year-old Henry VI had begun his own rule without giving York any position of great responsibility.

If York belonged to the ‘hawks’ among the country’s nobility, so too did the king’s uncle, Humfrey of Gloucester. By the autumn of 1446 King Charles was demanding the return of ever more English holdings in France, and Henry VI, under Marguerite’s influence, was inclined to grant it. But Humfrey, who would be a powerful opponent of this policy, would have to be got out of the way. In February 1447 – under, it was said, the aegis of Marguerite, Suffolk and the Beaufort faction – Gloucester was summoned to a parliament at Bury St Edmunds, only to find himself arrested by the queen’s steward and accused of having spread the canard that Suffolk was Marguerite’s lover. He was allowed to retire to his lodgings while the king debated his fate but there, twelve days later, he died. The cause of his death has never been established and, though it may well have been natural, inevitably rumours of murder crept in – rumours, even, that Duke Humfrey, like Edward II before him, had been killed by being ‘thrust into the bowel with an hot burning spit’.

Gloucester had been King Henry’s nearest male relative and therefore, despite his age, heir. His death promoted York to that prominent, tantalising position. The following month Cardinal Beaufort died too. The way was opening up for younger men – and women. Marguerite did not miss her opportunity and over the next few years could be seen extending her influence through her new English homeland, often in a specifically female way.

A letter from Margery Paston, of the Norfolk family whose communications tell us much about the events of these times, tells of how when the queen was at Norwich she sent for one Elizabeth Clere, ‘and when she came into the Queen’s presence, the Queen made right much of her, and desired her to have a husband’. Marguerite the matchmaker was also active for one Thomas Burneby, ‘sewer for our mouth [food taster]’, telling the object of his attention that Burneby loved her ‘for the womanly and virtuous governance that ye be renowned of’. To the father of another reluctant bride, sought by a yeoman of the crown, she wrote that, since his daughter was in his ‘rule and governance’, he should give his ‘good consent, benevolence and friendship to induce and excite your daughter to accept my said lord’s servant and ours, to her husband’. Other letters of hers request that her shoemaker might be spared jury service ‘at such times as we shall have need of his craft, and send for him’; that the game in a park where she intended to hunt ‘be spared, kept and cherished for the same intent, without suffering any other person there to hunt’. For a queen to exercise patronage and protection – to be a ‘good lady’ to her dependants – was wholly acceptable. But Marguerite was still failing in her more pressing royal duty.

In contrast to that of the prolific Yorks, the royal marriage, despite the queen’s visits to Thomas à Becket’s shrine at Canterbury, was bedevilled by the lack of children. A prayer roll of Marguerite’s, unusually dedicated to the Virgin Mary rather than to the Saviour, shows her kneeling hopefully at the Virgin’s feet, probably praying for a pregnancy. One writer had expressed, on Marguerite’s arrival in England, the Psalmist’s hope that ‘Thy wife shall be as the fruitful vine upon the walls of thy house’; and the perceived link between a fertile monarchy and a fertile land only added to the weight of responsibility. As early as 1448 a farm labourer was arrested for declaring that ‘Our Queen was none able to be Queen of England … for because that she beareth no child, and because that we have no prince in this land.’

The problem was probably with Henry, whose sexual drive was not high. The young man who famously left the room when one of his courtiers brought bare-bosomed dancing girls to entertain him may also have been swayed by a spiritual counsellor who preached the virtues of celibacy. But it was usually the woman who was blamed in such circumstances, and so it was now. A child would have aligned the queen more clearly with English interests, and perhaps removed from her the pressure of making herself felt in other, less acceptable, ways. Letters written by the king were now going out accompanied by a matching letter from the queen, and it was clear who was the more forceful personality.

Henry VI had never managed to implement his agreement to return Anjou and Maine to France, and in 1448 a French army had been despatched to take what had been promised. The following year a temporary truce was broken by a misguided piece of militarism on the part of Somerset, now (like his brother before him) England’s military commander in France and (like his brother before him) making a woeful showing in the role. The French retaliation swept into Normandy. Rouen – where York and Cecily had ruled – swiftly fell, and soon Henry V’s great conquests were but a distant memory. York would have been more than human had he not instanced this as one more example of his rival’s inadequacies, while Suffolk (now elevated to a dukedom) did not hesitate to suggest that York aspired to the throne itself. In 1449 York was sent to occupy a new post as governor of Ireland – or, as Jean de Waurin had it, ‘was expelled from court and exiled to Ireland’. Cecily went with him and there gave birth to a son, George, in Dublin. The place was known even then as a graveyard of reputations; still, given the timing, they may have been better off there in comfortable exile. English politics were becoming ever more factionalised, and some of the quarrels could be seen swirling around the head of Margaret Beaufort, only six years old though she might have been.

After her father’s death wardship of the valuable young heiress, with the right to reap the income of her lands, had been given to Suffolk – although, unusually for the English nobility, the baby was at least left in her mother’s care. Her marriage, however, was never going to be left to her mother to arrange. By 1450 she was a pawn of which her guardian had urgent necessity.

Most of the blame for the recent disasters in England’s long war with France had been heaped on Suffolk’s head (though there was enmity left over and to spare for Marguerite, whose father¹⁷ had actually been one of the commanders in the French attack). Suffolk was arrested in January 1450; immediately, to protect the position of his own family, he arranged the marriage of the six-year-old heiress Margaret to his eight-year-old son John de la Pole. Presumably in this, as in everything else, Suffolk had Queen Marguerite’s support.

The marriage of two minors, too young to give consent, and obviously unconsummated, could not be wholly binding: Margaret herself would always disregard it, speaking of her next husband as her first. None the less, it was significant enough to play its part; when, a few weeks later, the Commons accused Suffolk of corruption and incompetence, and of selling out England to the French, prominent among the charges was that he had arranged the marriage ‘presuming and pretending her [Margaret] to be next inheritable to the Crown’.

Suffolk was placed in the Tower, but appealed directly to the king. Henry, to the fury of both the Commons and the Lords, absolved him of all capital charges and sentenced him to a comparatively lenient five years’ banishment. Shakespeare has Marguerite pleading against even this punishment,¹⁸ with enough passion to cause her husband concern and to have the Earl of Warwick declare it a slander to her royal dignity. But in fact the king had already gone as far as he felt able in resisting the pressure from both peers and parliament, who would rather have seen Suffolk executed. And indeed, when at the end of April the duke finally set sail, having been granted a six-week respite to set his affairs in order, their wish was granted. Suffolk was murdered on his way into exile, his body cast ashore at Dover on 2 May.

It had been proved all too clearly that Henry VI, unlike his immediate forbears, was a king unable to control his own subjects. Similarly, Marguerite had none of the power which, a century before, had enabled Isabella of France to rule with and protect for so long her favourite and lover Mortimer. It has been said that when the news of Suffolk’s end reached the queen – broken to her by his widow, Alice Chaucer – she shut herself into her rooms at Westminster to weep for three days. In fact, king and queen were then at Leicester, which casts some doubt on the whole story – but tales of Marguerite’s excessive, compromising grief would have been met with angry credence by the ordinary people.

It was said at the time that, because Suffolk had apparently been murdered by sailors out of Kent, the king and queen planned to raze that whole county. Within weeks of his death came the populist rising led by Jack Cade, or ‘John Amend-All’ as he called himself, a colourful Yorkist sympathiser backed by three thousand mostly Kentish men. The rebels demanded an inquiry into Duke Humfrey’s death, and that the crown lands and common freedoms given away on Suffolk’s advice should all be restored. They also made particular complaint against the Duchess of Suffolk; indeed, her perceived influence may have been the reason that, the following year, parliament demanded the dismissal of the duchess from court.

By the middle of June the rebels were camped on Blackheath, just south of London. In early July they entered the city and were joined by many of the citizens. Several days of looting and riot changed that; and Cade fled to Sussex, where he was killed. But the rebellion had exposed even more cruelly than before the weakness of the government. The royal pardons offered to the rebels were declared, as was customary if in this case unlikely, to have been won from Henry by ‘the most humble and persistent supplications, prayers and requests of our most serene and beloved wife and consort the queen’.

As if the Cade rebellion were not enough, the authorities also had a stream of bad news from France with which to contend. In May the Duke of Somerset had been forced to follow the surrender of Rouen by that of Caen.

By the time Cherbourg fell, on 12 August 1450, England had, as one Paston correspondent put it, ‘not a foot of ground left in Normandy’. But Somerset’s favour with the queen survived his military disasters. It was Marguerite who protected him, on his return to London, from demands that he should be charged as a traitor; but this flamboyant partisanship was itself a potential source of scandalous rumour, despite the fact that Somerset’s wife, Eleanor Beauchamp, was also close to the queen.

In the vacuum left by Suffolk’s death two leading candidates arose to fulfil the position of the king’s chief councillor. One was indeed the Duke of Somerset, Margaret Beaufort’s uncle. The other was Cecily’s husband Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, now making a hasty unannounced return from Ireland and intensely aware of his position both as the king’s ranking male kinsman and as the progenitor of a flourishing nursery: ‘the issue that it pleased God to send me of the royal blood’, as he put it pointedly.

York’s dissatisfaction was no doubt partly personal – he had been left seriously out of pocket by his experiences abroad – but at the start of the 1450s he could be seen at the same time as heading a call for genuine reform. Six years into Marguerite’s queenship the crown of England was in a lamentable state; its finances were so bad that the Epiphany feast of 1451 had reputedly to be called off because suppliers would no longer allow the court food on credit, while the king’s officials had recently been petitioning parliament for several years’ back wages. This was certainly no new problem – the financial position had been serious a decade before Marguerite arrived in England – but it was now worse than ever. By 1450, the crown was almost £400,000 in debt.

The military campaign in France had been disastrously expensive, and the war inevitably caused disruption to trade – but the costs of maintaining the royal court were also now conspicuously far greater than the revenues available, especially under the influence of a high-spending queen;¹⁹ while there was widespread suspicion that her favourites were being allowed to feather their nests too freely. On her arrival in England parliament had voted Marguerite the income usually bestowed on queens – 10,000 marks, or some £6700; but the parlous state of her husband’s finances meant that those sums due her from the Exchequer were often not forthcoming. The surviving accounts show her making determined efforts to claim her dues, but they also show formidable expenditure – not just the £73 she gave to a Venetian merchant for luxury cloth, or the £25 to equip a Christmas ‘disguising’ at the Greenwich ‘pleasaunce’ (Humfrey, Duke of Gloucester’s former residence which Marguerite had now adopted as her own), but sums of money clearly used to reward, in cash or in kind, her allies.

The parliament of May 1451 heard a petition for York to be named heir presumptive to the childless Henry VI, and his and Cecily’s sons after him. Everything known about her would suggest that Cecily stood right alongside her husband, whose supporters were by the beginning of 1452 claiming that the king ‘was fitter for a cloister than a throne, and had in a manner deposed himself by leaving the affairs of his kingdom in the hands of a woman who merely used his name to conceal her usurpation, since, according to the laws of England, a queen consort hath no power but title only’.

The charge is to some degree substantiated by the number of grants made ‘by the advice of the council of the Queen’ as revealed in accounts of the Queen’s Wardrobe department for 1452–3; and while some have queried whether the enmity between Marguerite and York was as instinctive and as early as has popularly been supposed, there is no doubt that by this point real conflict was on the way. By February 1452 both sides were raising troops. On 2 March the two armies drew up, three miles apart, near Blackheath.

Neither party, however, was yet quite ready to fight. A royal delegation of two bishops and two earls was sent to command York, in the king’s name, to return to his allegiance. Prominent among York’s demands was that Somerset be arrested and York himself acknowledged as the king’s heir. Back in the royal camp, so one account goes, the bishops saw to it that the queen was kept occupied while they spoke to the king, who was persuaded to agree to all the demands. But the next morning there was a dramatic scene when Marguerite intercepted the guards who were leading Somerset away and instead took him to the king’s tent so that York, arriving a few minutes later to make his peace with his monarch, found himself also confronting a furious queen. Somerset was clearly in as much favour as ever; York felt he had been fooled. He had no option, however, but to make a humiliating public pledge of his loyalty before being allowed to withdraw to his estates in Ludlow. Armed conflict had been averted for the moment, but the divisions in the English nobility were deeper than ever. The resentful York and his adherents remained a threat for a king and a court party anxious to strengthen their position in any possible way; and one of the ways most favoured by the age was marriage. In February 1453 Margaret Beaufort’s mother was commanded to bring her nine-year-old daughter – Somerset’s niece – to court.

During the first years of Marguerite’s queenship Margaret had been raised at her own family seat of Bletsoe,²⁰ as well as at Maxey in the Fens. Her mother had remarried, and there is evidence from her later life both that Margaret developed an enduring closeness to her five St John half-siblings and that she shared several of her mother’s traits: piety, a love of learning, and a desire for money and property. On 23 April 1453, she and her mother attended the annual celebration to honour the Knights of the Garter that marked St George’s Day; on 12 May the king put through a generous payment of 100 marks for the ‘arrayment’ of his ‘right dear and well beloved cousin Margaret’. But Margaret Beaufort had not been invited to court just for a party. The king had decided both to dissolve her marriage to Suffolk’s son, and to transfer her wardship to two new guardians: his half-brothers Edmund and Jasper Tudor. These were the sons of Henry’s mother, Katherine de Valois, by her second, secret, alliance with a young Welshman in her service, the lowly Owen Tudor – or ‘Tydder’, as enemies spelt it slightingly. More to the point, they were half-brothers whom the still childless Henry had begun to favour.

It seems certain that when the king had the marriage with Suffolk’s son dissolved, he already had it in mind to marry Margaret and her fortune to Edmund, the elder of his two half-brothers. This could take place in just over two years’ time, as soon as she turned twelve and reached the age of consent. It is possible Henry envisaged this move as a step to making Edmund his heir, though of course Edmund’s own lineage gave him no shadow of a claim to the English throne. He certainly had royal blood in his veins – but it was the blood of the French royal house. Marriage might allow him to absorb Margaret’s claim to the throne of England – a claim which, of course, would be inherited by any sons of the marriage. And the fact that Henry had neither children nor royal siblings meant that even comparatively distant claims were coming into prominence.

The formal changes in her marital situation required some participation from the nine-year-old Margaret herself. She would later imagine it as a real choice and an expression of manifest destiny, praying to St Nicholas to help her choose between the two husbands; but she was essentially fooling herself. Her account of a dream vision the night before she had to give her answer was given in later life to her chaplain, John Fisher. As she lay in prayer, about four in the morning, ‘one appeared unto her arrayed like a Bishop, and naming unto her Edmund, bade take him unto her husband. And so by this means she did incline her mind unto Edmund, the King’s brother, and Earl of Richmond.’ Perhaps that ‘by this means she did incline her mind …’ is the real story – perhaps Margaret, even then, was trying to invent a scenario to mask the unpalatable fact that she would have had no choice in the matter. Or perhaps the story was only later Tudor propaganda, designed to reinforce the message that they were a divinely ordained dynasty.