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then, in a moment, see

How soon this mightiness meets misery

Henry VIII, Prologue

Even by the standards of these tumultuous years, the ups and downs of these few months were extraordinary. In the summer of 1460, Cecily’s Yorkist menfolk were back with a fresh army. At Northampton, in July, they again met the forces of the king and queen, and this time the Yorkists were able to seize the person of Henry VI and bring him back to London as their puppet or prisoner, all the while proclaiming their loyalty.

The London chronicler Gregory described Marguerite’s flight. ‘The queen, hearing this, voided unto Wales but … a servant of her own … spoiled her and robbed her, and put her so in doubt of her life and son’s life also.’ But they managed to escape. ‘And then she come to the castle of Harlech in Wales [the home of Jasper Tudor], and she had many great gifts and [was] greatly comforted, for she had need thereof …’ She had only four companions, the chronicler reports in horror (a great lady’s household might be a hundred and fifty) and she was often forced to ride pillion behind a fourteen-year-old boy.

Marguerite was not the only woman whose fortunes had changed overnight. Everything was changing, once again, for Cecily, too. In this latest battle, her brother-in-law the Duke of Buckingham had been among the casualties. While Warwick returned to Calais in triumph to fetch his family home, Cecily, with her younger children, moved to London, to await word from her husband. As Queen Marguerite fled westwards, York sent for Cecily (travelling in a chair of blue velvet,³⁵ ‘and four pair coursers therein’) to come and meet him in Hereford, to share his triumphal progress, heralded by trumpeters and displaying the royal arms, back towards the city.

It surely says something about their relationship that he wanted her by his side, riding in victory through the green summer countryside. But in fact the very flamboyance of their entry may have worked against them. Citizens and nobles alike were pleased enough to welcome York: a steady hand to keep anarchy at bay. But when it looked as though he would claim the throne itself, it was clear they were no more ready to accept this usurpation than they had been Marguerite’s proxy sovereignty. One monastic chronicler, the Abbot of St Albans John Whethamsted, left a long and vivid description of the misstep into which York’s ‘exaltation of mood’ led him; right down to the distribution of the major players around Westminster palace. York strode to the parliamentary chamber and laid his hand upon the throne as if to claim it. He waited for the applause which, however, failed to come and then (the king being ‘in the queen’s apartments’) moved to the principal chamber of the palace, smashing the locks to gain his entry.

People of all ‘estates and ranks, age, sex, order and condition’ had begun to murmur against York’s presumption. By the end of October 1460 a deal had been hammered out by which Henry would keep the throne for his lifetime but would not be succeeded by his son. Instead, York and York’s sons would be his heirs, an idea presumably made more plausible by that long whispering campaign suggesting Marguerite’s infidelity. Such a prospect, with its huge advancement for her children, must have been welcome to Cecily. But of course Marguerite, whose own young son had been disinherited, was never going to accept it quietly.

Towards the end of the year she took ship northwards from Wales. Marguerite’s plan was to appeal for help from the Scots – where, ironically, another woman, Mary of Guelders, was commencing her rule as regent on behalf of her eight-year-old son James, her husband having recently been killed by an exploding cannon while besieging Yorkist sympathisers at Roxburgh. Mary sent an envoy to escort Marguerite and her young son to Dumfries and Lincluden Abbey where they were royally entertained and herself came down to meet them. The two queens spent twelve days together at the abbey; and Mary promised military aid, offering the hospitality of the Scottish royal palaces while it was assembled. Moving into England with a foreign army would do little to increase her popularity, but Marguerite was in no mood to worry.

With Henry’s captivity she had now become the undisputed leader of what was beginning to look like a genuine opposition party: stripped of much she had once enjoyed, but liberated for the first time to act openly on her own initiative. The Yorkist lords, according to Gregory’s Chronicle, tried to lure Marguerite back to London with faked messages from her husband, ‘for they knew well that all the workings that were done grew by her, for she was more wittier than the king …’.

As the Duke of York moved north to meet the impending Lancastrian threat, Marguerite’s name was being invoked by friends and enemies alike – even before she was ready to leave Scotland. York, holed up in his own Sandal Castle, was advised (says the Tudor writer Hall, whose grandfather had been the adviser concerned) not to sally out, but answered it would be dishonour to do so ‘for dread of a scolding woman, whose only weapons are her tongue and her nails’. The Lancastrian herald, trying to provoke York into taking a dangerous offensive, sneered that he should allow himself ‘to be tamely braved by a woman’.

York should have heeded all the warnings. For now, once again, it would be Cecily’s turn to drink a bitter cup. No wonder she, like Margaret Beaufort, would remember the image of Fortune’s wheel; and would, perhaps ironically, bequeath a bed decorated with that image to the Tudor dynasty. In the words of an anonymous poem:

I have see fall to men of high nobleness –

First wealth, and then again distress,

Now up, now down, as fortune turneth her wheel

On December 30 the royal forces (under the command of the third Duke of Somerset, Margaret Beaufort’s cousin, who shared his father’s and uncle’s strong Lancastrian loyalty) met the Yorkists at the battle of Wakefield. The Yorkists were defeated; and casualties of the rout included York himself, pulled from his horse in the thick of the fray and his seventeen-year-old son Edmund, with whose death Shakespeare would make such play. Salisbury (whose son had also died) was killed the next day. Their heads were set on spikes on the gates of York city, the duke’s capped with a paper crown. Tudor chroniclers like Hall and Holinshed,³⁶ followed by Shakespeare, had the heads presented to a savagely vengeful Marguerite. But in fact Marguerite left Scotland only after news of the victory, travelling southwards in an outfit of black and silver lent to her by the Scottish queen Mary.

Cecily had lost a husband, a son, a brother, and a nephew. The news must have reached her and her three youngest children in London, probably at Baynard’s Castle, with the taste of the Christmas feasts still in their mouths. A great house like Baynard’s Castle with its gardens and terraces, its great hall and its courtyards capable of holding the four hundred armed men the Duke had once brought with him from Ireland, must have seemed a place of refuge in a treacherously shifting world. But the Duke of York’s death brought to an end a long and in many ways happy union. It had also narrowly deprived Cecily of her chance of being queen, and she would not forget it easily.

Marguerite’s party were once more in the ascendant. As the queen came south with her forces, some time in January or early February 1461, she sent letters – one on her own behalf, and one in the name of her young son – to the authorities of London, demanding the city’s loyalty. The one from the seven-year-old prince presents him as the active avenger, heading his army, and mentions his mother only as a potential victim. Marguerite’s own letter is obliged to suggest that she is acting in tandem with her young son; but it does present her forcefully: ‘Praying you, on our most hearty and desirous wise, that [above] all earthly things you will diligently intend [attend] to the surety of my lord’s royal person in the mean time; so that through malice of his said enemy he be no more troubled, vexed, or jeoparded. And, by so doing, we shall be unto you such a lady as of reason you shall largely be content.’

As her army swept ever southwards, her troops pillaged the land³⁷ and, unable to pay them, she did nothing to prevent it. Their actions did much to sour her subsequent reputation, besides providing fuel for Yorkist propaganda that implicitly linked this catastrophic ‘misrule’ with the parallel reversal of right order represented by a woman’s leadership.

After the second battle of St Albans, on 17 February 1461, the reports were full of mentions of the queen or the queen’s party. One source, the Milanese ambassador in France, Prospero di Camulio, seems even to suggest that this time she was in the thick of the fray: ‘The earl of Warwick decided to quit the field, and … pushed through right into Albano [St Albans], where the queen was with 30,000 men.’ The chronicler Gregory wrote that in the midst of the battle ‘King Harry went to his queen and forsook all his lords, and trusted better to her party than to his own. …’ One anecdotal report of a speech Marguerite once made to her men is as heroic in its way as Elizabeth I’s at Tilbury: ‘I have often broken [the English] battle line. I have mowed down ranks far more stubborn than theirs are now. You who once followed a peasant girl [Joan of Arc] now follow a queen … I will either conquer or be conquered with you.’

Marguerite had by now experienced far more warfare than most ladies of her time. She had known the tension beforehand, mounting to fever pitch; the fear that each step of your horse’s hoof could bring it down on the sharp point of a hidden caltrop, before men rushed out from ambush to claim you as their prey; and the roads afterwards, crammed with the bodies of horses and with bleeding, dying men who lacked even the strength to crawl away.

When the engagement at St Albans was over King Henry, brought there by Warwick under guard, was found seated under an oak tree, and Marguerite was reunited with her husband. As the couple halted outside London the city officials requested that a carefully chosen delegation of ladies should act in the traditional way as go-betweens, interceding with Marguerite ‘for to be benevolent and owe goodwill to the city’. The ladies were Ismanie, Lady Scales³⁸ who had been among those escorting Marguerite from France and who had remained in her household; the widowed Duchess of Buckingham, Cecily of York’s sister, whose husband had been killed the previous summer fighting in the Lancastrian cause; and Jacquetta, dowager Duchess of Bedford, another member of the party that had escorted Marguerite to England. Of the princely house of Luxembourg, and married in her youth to Henry VI’s uncle John, Jacquetta had been widowed in 1435 at the age of nineteen; ‘minding also to marry rather for pleasure than for honour, without counsel of her friends’ she had promptly taken as her second husband ‘a lusty knight, Sir Richard Woodville’. Jacquetta had remained close to the queen; and indeed her eldest daughter Elizabeth³⁹ may have been one of Marguerite’s ladies. Now not only was Jacquetta’s own husband with the queen’s force, but so too had been her daughter’s husband John Grey, father of her two young sons. Grey had recently died at the second battle of St Albans; and it was Elizabeth Woodville’s widowhood that would soon propel her into national history.

A letter reported that the delegation had returned to London on 20 February with news that ‘the king and queen had no mind to pillage the chief city and chamber of their realm, and so they promised; but at the same time they did not mean that they would not punish the evildoers’. The message was sufficiently ambiguous that there was still panic in the streets, and the ladies were sent out again two days later to request the Lancastrian leaders to enter the city without the main body of their army. The queen conceded; ironically, her decision to send only a small symbolic force into London, and her subsequent withdrawal to Dunstable, would prove to be arguably the biggest mistake of her life. The wheel was about to turn yet again.

The huge overturns of fortune did not come heralded in any way. In the weeks after the battle of Wakefield, Cecily Neville had been so afraid that she had sent her two younger sons, George and Richard, abroad to the safety of Burgundy. Yet almost as she did so her eldest son Edward and the Earl of Warwick, with their armies, were preparing to approach London from the west. On 27 February they were welcomed into the city, where Edward went to his mother’s house of Baynard’s Castle.

This time there was no talk of loyalty to King Henry – or of wishing only to rid him of his evil counsellors. On 1 March the Bishop of Exeter, Warwick’s brother, asked the eager Londoners whether they felt that Henry deserved to rule, ‘whereunto’, as the Great Chronicle of London reported, ‘the people cried hugely and said Nay. And after it was asked of them whether they would have the Earl of March [Edward] for their king and they cried with one voice, Yea, Yea.’

Cecily Neville’s eldest son, the ‘fair white rose’ of York, was still only eighteen but when, three days later, he was acclaimed and enthroned, his huge stature and glowing golden looks made him seem every inch the king. The youthful Edward with his royal bloodline was not only the favourite candidate backed by Warwick and the Neville party, but had recently proved his mettle with his victory at Mortimer’s Cross.

But the Yorkists had not yet completely won. London was not England. On 13 March, with Warwick already engaged recruiting men in the Midlands, King Edward marched his army north where Henry and Marguerite still commanded the loyalty of a majority of the nobility. Prospero di Camulio erroneously heard that Marguerite had given her husband poison, after persuading him to abdicate in favour of their son: ‘However these are rumours in which I do not repose much confidence.’ And very soon, after the dreadful battle of Towton, di Camulio was writing less cautiously.

Fought outside York in wintry weather, on an icy Palm Sunday, Towton is still probably the bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil. No detailed description survives, and the numbers of those involved, as estimated by contemporary reporters and later historians, vary wildly. But what is agreed is that this was a ten-hour endurance test in which men slogged each other to exhaustion; one in which King Edward told his men to give no quarter; and the opposing Lancastrians, with the wind against them, suffered snow and arrows blowing together into their faces.

Before the battle even began both sides were already tired and frozen after a bitter night spent in the biting wind. None the less, the fighting went on until ten o’clock at night, long after it was dark. By dusk the Lancastrian forces had been driven backwards to a deep gully of the river Cock, and many who were not hacked down were drowned as they tried to cross. It was, says the Great Chronicle of London, ‘a sore and long and unkindly fight – for there was the son against the father, the brother against brother’. Crowland talks of more than thirty-eight thousand dead; and though that is probably an exaggeration, ‘many a lady’, said Gregory’s Chronicle, lost her beloved that day.

For others, of course, the news was good. Cecily had word of the victory early, on 3 April, as William Paston wrote: ‘Please you to know such tidings as my Lady of York hath by a letter of credence under the sign manual of our sovereign lord king Edward, which letter came unto our said lady this same day … at xi clock and was seen and read by me.’ The Bishop of Elphin, as he subsequently told the Papal Legate, sets the glad tidings later:⁴⁰ ‘On Easter Monday, at the vesper hour [sunset], I was in the house of the Duchess of York. Immediately after vespers the Lord Treasurer came to her with an authentic letter … On hearing the news the Duchess [returned] to the chapel with two chaplains and myself and there we said “Te Deum” after which I told her that the time was come for writing to your Lordship, of which she approved. …’

Now it was Marguerite, her husband and her son who were to flee, leaving York, where they waited for news, with only what they could carry. As Prospero di Camulio wrote: ‘Any one who reflects at all upon the wretchedness of that queen and the ruins of those killed and considers the ferocity of the country, and the state of mind of the victors, should indeed, it seems to me, pray to God for the dead and not less for the living.’