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Where’s Captain Margaret to fence you now?

Henry VI Part 3, 2.6

In 1455, shortly after her uncle Somerset had been killed in the queen’s cause, Margaret Beaufort had reached her twelfth birthday. Until this time, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, she had probably been left in her mother’s care, but when the king’s half-brother Edmund Tudor was sent to Wales as the king’s representative late that year he would almost certainly have been able to take Margaret with him as his wife. Popular opinion would have suggested that, even though it was now legal, consummation of the marriage should be delayed – the more so since Margaret was slight and undeveloped for her age. But other factors weighed more heavily with Edmund: fathering a child on Margaret would give him a life interest in her lands; and though there was now a Lancastrian heir, there was still not a spare. She became pregnant in the first half of 1456, some time before her thirteenth birthday. It would at best have been an anxious time for her, but worse was to follow. Edmund did not live to see the birth of his child. Captured at Carmarthen by an ally of the Duke of York’s, he was soon released but caught plague there and died in November.

Isolated in plague-ridden Wales and heavily pregnant, a terrified Margaret had only one ally close at hand – her brother-in-law Jasper Tudor, who, himself only in his early twenties, was called to take on this quasi-paternal role. She fled to his stronghold of Pembroke and it was there that on 28 January 1457 she gave birth to a boy.

The ceremony that was supposed to surround the birth of a possible heir to the throne was described in ordinances Margaret Beaufort herself laid down in later life for the birth of her first grandchild; and though there was obviously more ritual involved in the confinement of a queen than in that of a mere great lady, the essential goals were the same. The woman went apart, some weeks before the birth, into carefully prepared rooms: ‘Her Highness’s pleasure being understood as to what chamber it may please her to be delivered in, the same to be hung with rich cloth or arras, sides, roof, windows and all, except one window, which must be hanged so that she have light when it pleases her.’ She took communion, then progressed in state to her apartments; took wine and sweetmeats with her (male) officers and then bade them farewell. As she entered her chamber she passed into a female world, where ‘women are to be made all manner of officers, butlers, sewers and pages; receiving all needful things at the chamber door’. It was meant to create a protective environment for mother and child alike – perhaps conditions as near womb-like as possible.

After the birth a new mother was not allowed outdoors until she went for her ‘churching’ or purification some forty days later, accompanied by midwives and female attendants, bearing a lighted candle, to be sprinkled with holy water. Christine de Pizan gives a description of the lying-in of a mere merchant’s wife, who arranged that awe-struck visitors should walk past an ornamental bed and a dresser ‘decorated like an altar’ with silver vessels before even reaching her own bedchamber: ‘large and handsome’, with tapestries all around, and a bed made up with cobweb-fine display sheets, and even a gold-embroidered rug ‘on which one could walk’. ‘Sitting in the bed was the woman herself, dressed in crimson silk, propped up against large pillows covered in the same silk and decorated with pearl buttons, wearing the headdress of a lady.’ But it seems likely that Margaret Beaufort’s circumstances militated against any such pleasurable feminine display.

We know that women were as anxious then as now to take any precaution they could against the perils of childbirth: from a favourite midwife to the Virgin’s girdle. Even in a lower sphere of society, Margaret Paston was so eager to get the midwife she wanted that the woman – though incapacitated by a back injury – had to reassure her she’d be there, even if she had to be pushed in a barrow. What we do not know is to just what degree the conditions of the year or the remoteness of the place changed things for Margaret. But we know the birth did not go easily.

The labour was long and difficult. Both Margaret and the child were expected to die, and were there to be a choice some Church authorities urged that those in attendance should prioritise the unbaptised baby, even it were not a valuable boy. There seems little doubt that her physical immaturity was part of the problem – as her confessor John Fisher would later put it: ‘It seemed a miracle that of so little a personage anyone should have been born at all.’ She herself thought so, at least: in later years she would combine forces with her daughter-in-law Elizabeth of York to ensure that her young granddaughter and namesake Margaret was not sent to Scotland too early lest her new husband, the king of Scotland, would not wait to consummate the marriage ‘but injure her, and endanger her health’.

There seems little doubt that Margaret Beaufort was indelibly marked by her early experiences – perhaps physically,²⁸ since neither of her two subsequent marriages produced any children, and certainly mentally.^fn2 Contemporaries remarked on her sense of vulnerability. The image of Fortune’s wheel was impossible for contemporary commentators to avoid:

But Fortune with her smiling countenance strange

Of all our purpose may make sudden change.

So ran the jingle. Margaret’s confessor would say, in the ‘Mornynge Remembraunce’ sermon he preached a month after her death, that ‘she never was yet in that prosperity but the greater it was the more always she dread the adversity’. That whenever ‘she had full great joy, she let not to say, that some adversity would follow’. (However, the other early Tudor biographer, the court poet Bernard André,²⁹ claimed that she was ‘steadfast and more stable than the weakness in women suggests’.)

Even the trauma she had suffered did not long subdue the young mother’s determination. There are few early proofs of Margaret Beaufort’s character, but, if the tale is true, this is surely one of them. The sixteenth-century Welsh chronicler Elis Gruffydd claimed that Jasper had the baby christened Owen; it was Margaret who forced the officiating bishop to christen him again with a name allied to the English throne – Henry.

The next few weeks – the beginning of her official period of mourning – would be spent at Pembroke caring for her delicate baby. But his birth demanded speedy action. In March, almost as soon as she was churched and received back into public life, she and her brother-in-law Jasper were travelling towards Newport and the home of the Duke of Buckingham. A new marriage had to be arranged for her,³⁰ and an alliance that would protect her son. The choice was Henry Stafford, a mild man some twenty years older than she but, crucially, the second son of the Duke of Buckingham, a staunchly Lancastrian magnate almost as powerful as his brother-in-law the Duke of York – Anne, Duchess of Buckingham was Cecily Neville’s sister. A dispensation was needed, since the pair were second cousins; by 6 April it had been granted, although the actual marriage ceremony would not take place until Margaret’s mourning was complete, on 3 January 1458.

The bride, still only fourteen, would keep the grander title her first marriage had won her, Countess of Richmond, but she brought with her estates now enriched by her dowager’s rights. Her son Henry Tudor would at first probably have remained in Wales in his uncle’s care. But the arrangement appears to have been a happy one, with Margaret and her new husband visiting Jasper and baby Henry at Pembroke; the elder Buckinghams welcoming their new daughter-in-law (Duchess Anne would bequeath Margaret several choice books); and – despite the absence of any further children – every sign of contentment, at least, between the pair. Margaret would seem to have found a safe haven – except that events would not leave any haven tranquil and unmolested for long.

In the spring of 1458 the adversarial parties in the royal dispute were brought to the ceremony of formal reconciliation known as a ‘Loveday’. It was in everyone’s interest that some unity should be restored to the country. Queen Marguerite and the Duke of York walked hand in hand into church to exhibit their amity before God. The pose showed queenly intercession, peacemaking; but it also cast her as York’s equal and political match. Ironically, what might sound to modern ears like a tribute to her activities was actually a devaluation of her status: as queen, she was supposed to be above the fray. To remain on that pedestal might keep her immobile; but to step down from it exposed her vulnerability.

The pacific image was, moreover, misleading. In the summer and autumn of 1458 there were fresh clashes between Marguerite and the Yorkists. She had the Earl of Warwick summoned to London to account for acts of piracy he had committed while governor of Calais, to which post he had been appointed the previous year. He arrived with a large force of armed retainers wearing his livery, and his supporters rallied protests in the city against the queen and the authorities. Tensions deepened when Warwick narrowly escaped impalement on a spit as he passed through the royal kitchens. He claimed that the queen had paid the scullion who was wielding it to murder him. Later that year Marguerite left London. She was assembling a personal army – what one report described as ‘queen’s gallants’, sporting the livery badge of her little son.

A random letter preserved in the archives of Exeter Cathedral, concerning a snub to the crown’s candidate for the deanery, gives a taste of her mood at this time. It had been reported that some of the cathedral chapter were inclined to set aside the royal recommendations, to which news Marguerite retorted that it would be ‘to our great marvel and displeasure if it be so. Wherefore we desire and heartily pray you forthwith that for reverence of us … you will … be inclined and yield to the accomplishment of my lord’s invariable intention and our in this matter.’ It is notable that Henry’s letter of confirmation was shorter and feebler, and that the officer sent down to see that the royal will was done was Marguerite’s own master of jewels. But it is also true, of course, that as a woman she was only ever able to act in the name of her husband or of her tiny son.

The chronicler Polydore Vergil says that the queen (who was ‘for diligence, circumspection and speedy execution of causes, comparable to a man’) believed a plan was afoot to put the Duke of York on the throne itself: ‘Wherefore this wise woman [called] together the council to provide remedy for the disordered state of things. …’ At a meeting of the council in Coventry in the summer of 1459 York, Warwick and their adherents were indicted for their non-appearance ‘by counsel of the queen’. Nominally, of course, the council was the king’s council, and it was he who was still ruling the country. But the queen’s dominance must have made it hard for many a loyal Englishman to be sure just where his loyalties lay.

The anonymous English Chronicle declares that now was the moment when the Yorkists worked hardest to spread rumours. ‘The queen was defamed and denounced, that he that was called prince, was not her son, but a bastard gotten in adultery; wherefore she, dreading that he should not succeed his father in the crown of England, sought the alliance of all the knights and squires of Cheshire, to have their benevolence, and held open household among them.’

In the context of armed conflict Marguerite was far from negligible, but here too she could only act by proxy. One chronicle describes how it was ‘by her urging’ that the king – nominally – assembled an army. But as that army met the York/Neville forces in the autumn of 1459 at Blore Heath, Marguerite could only wait for news a few miles away. That news included the fact that Thomas, Lord Stanley, whose forces had been promised to her, had in fact held them neutral and outside the fray. It was after this battle that Marguerite reputedly told a local blacksmith to put the shoes of her horse on backwards, to disguise her tracks as she rode away. Shakespeare’s Clarence in Henry VI Part 3 mocks ‘Captain Margaret’; but in fact the inability to fight in person would be a problem of female rule even for Elizabeth I in the next century. Christine de Pizan wrote that a baroness should know the laws of arms and the tactics necessary to defend her castle against attack; her queen, however, was expected to take a more passive role. Even at the Paston level a man could be found sending his wife to preserve their claim to the house; and she ordering crossbows. But Margaret Paston was eventually to find that ‘I cannot well guide nor rule soldiers’, who did not heed her as they would a man.

Nevertheless Marguerite’s influence was powerful. When the two armies faced off outside Ludlow a fortnight or so later, one source records that the Lancastrian soldiers would fight ‘for the love they bare to the King, but more for the fear they had of the Queen, whose countenance was so fearful and whose look was so terrible that to all men against whom she took displeasure, her frowning was their undoing and her indignation their death’. On this occasion the Yorkist forces ultimately backed off from armed conflict with their monarch, and the resultant flight has come to be called the rout of Ludford Bridge.

Warwick and Salisbury fled to Calais where their family was waiting. With them went Edward, Earl of March, the eldest son of York and Cecily. York himself and his second son, Edmund, fled to Ireland. Cecily and her younger children had most likely remained at Ludlow: a comfortable castle, since the residency there of York’s two eldest sons had ensured it was full of the fifteenth-century luxuries of chimneys, window glass and privacy, but now no sanctuary. Several sources record that she and her two youngest sons were taken prisoner there but it was never likely that any personal, physical reprisal would be taken against her, a woman. One chronicle does say that while the town of Ludlow was robbed to the bare walls ‘the noble Duchess of York unmanly and cruelly was entreated³¹ and [de]spoiled’, but the absence of any other sign of outrage suggests that the damage was only to her property.

When a parliament held at Coventry – packed with Marguerite’s supporters, and later known as the ‘Parliament of Devils’ – attainted the Yorkist lords, Cecily went to the city on 6 December and submitted. Gregory’s Chronicle recorded that: ‘The Duchess of York came unto King Harry and submitted her unto his grace,³² and she prayed for her husband that he might come to his answer to be received unto his grace: and the king full humbly granted her grace, and to all hers that would come with her. …’ Attainder meant not only that the men were convicted of treason, but that their lands were now the property of the crown. Cecily, however, was given a grant of a thousand marks per annum – income derived from some of those confiscated lands – ‘for the relief of her and her infants who had not offended against the king’.³³ Her sister-in-law the Countess of Salisbury was personally attainted;³⁴ Cecily was not. She was placed in custody; but the custodian was her own sister Anne, Duchess of Buckingham, whose husband had declared for the queen’s side and who seems to have kept her own natal Lancastrian sympathies. It is speculated that the comparative leniency with which Cecily was treated was the result of her friendship with Queen Marguerite – though the chronicles also report that ‘she was kept full straight with many a rebuke’ from her sister – and by January 1460 she was free to move southwards again. All the same, Cecily’s fortunes seemed to be at a low ebb.

No wonder the German artist Albrecht Dürer drew Fortune so frequently and in so many different guises, blind and pregnant, wounded or weaponed: the image reflected the arbitrary and ever-changing nature of these times. The poet John Skelton would lament Edward IV himself as Fortune’s fool:

She took me by the hand and led me a dance,

And with her sugared lips on me she smiled,

But, what from her dissembled countenance,

I could not beware till I was beguiled …

At this moment, the future prominence of Cecily’s son had never looked more unlikely.