TWELVE
Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune’s womb,
Is coming towards me, and my inward soul
With nothing trembles.
Richard II, 2.2
These were the mature years of Edward IV’s kingship. Time would prove that fractures within the Yorkist dynasty had never entirely healed – but for the moment they were concealed.
In 1476 came a chance for the celebration of the dynasty. An illustration probably made around that time shows the royal family and court in an earthly equivalent of the sacred Trinity they reverenced. The king and his men kneel on one side, the queen and her ladies on the other, with Elizabeth’s mother-in-law Cecily behind her wearing as a cloak the royal arms of England. Everything was set for an extraordinary scene – the reburial of Richard, Duke of York, Edward’s father.
It had been more than fifteen years since the duke and his son Edmund had perished at the battle of Wakefield and been buried there in the north with the scant ceremony accorded to those on the losing side of any war. It was time for them to be reburied in an appropriately splendid tomb, in the church attached to the Midlands castle of Fotheringhay. The ten-day procession south was intended to show the people that the Yorkist regime was here to stay; besides fulfilling filial piety, naturally.
The trailing black draperies must have turned brown with dust as the days went by. They had chosen high summer for the journey to avoid the winter mud that might make the horses slip and fall – it would have been unthinkable for the hearse to tilt and upset its precious cargo. The country people, too, would be out in the fields at this season and would see the procession pass by. The black clothes of the noble mourners, the black velvet stretched on hoops over the vehicle that bore the coffins, would have stood out like a stab of darkness against the blue and gold of the countryside. And in the towns, every trade guild could send its own little train of riders and banners to pay their respects, proudly carrying with them their crosses, their holy water and their holy relics, without too much fear that rain would spoil the local officials’ best clothes or tarnish the gold embroidery.
It had been on or shortly before Sunday, 21 July, that the bodies had been exhumed, probably from the priory of St John the Evangelist near Pontefract Castle. Central to the ceremonials was a life-size effigy of the duke. This was an honour normally permitted only to kings, queens and bishops – so a point was being made in relation to the legitimisation of the current monarchy. The effigy used at a king’s funeral represented the public, symbolic body of the monarch, still present and active even when the physical body had died. This duke’s effigy was clad in dark blue, the colour of a king’s mourning, and an angel held a crown over his head to signify the same assumption of royal dignity that had led his widow Cecily to call herself ‘queen by right’.
As chief mourner, Richard, Duke of Gloucester rode directly behind the coffins. His habitual residence in the north made him the natural choice to escort his father’s body south. Behind him rode the nobles and officers, then four hundred poor men on foot, each carrying a taper. The choir of the Chapel Royal sang at each church where the bodies rested overnight. This extraordinary cortège travelled about 13 miles a day.
The church of Fotheringhay still stands, its three-storey tower and belfry odder-looking, if less impressive, today since the chancel and cloisters were destroyed after the Reformation. But of the castle, only a grassy mound remains. Yet nothing can destroy the grandeur of the setting, looking south over the once-great river Nene, surrounded by the hunting forest of Rockingham. Besides the castle complex, the church and the market town there was formerly a collegiate establishment large enough to boast twelve fellows or chaplains – a centre of learning and piety. In 1476 Fotheringhay had only recently been relinquished, at his insistence, by Edward’s mother Cecily. But whether or not she had gone willingly she would have approved her son’s intention for Fotheringhay – to make it into a mausoleum for the York family. The installation of magnificent stained-glass windows in the chapel, begun by Cecily, was now complete: hence the timing of this ceremony.fn6
The king, according to a herald’s account, met his father’s body at the entrance to the churchyard and ‘very humbly did his obeisance to the said body and laid his hand on the body and kissed it, weeping’. During the service he ‘had his chamberlain offer to the body seven pieces of cloth of gold and each piece was five yards long, and the queen had five yards offered by her chamberlain and they were laid in the shape of a cross on the said body’.8
Cloth of gold was not necessarily gold in colour, more an indication of status. A sumptuary law of 1483 would state that no one ‘except the king, the queen, the king’s mother, the king’s children, his brothers and sister’ should wear it. Its mention during the Fotheringhay ceremonies is significant for another reason: it is the first time any woman has been referred to – even acting by proxy, and offering through her chamberlain – in the course of the obsequies.
The next day a horse was led to the church door, part of the traditional offering of the dead man’s knightly trappings: his coat of arms, shield, sword and helmet, each brought in by a different nobleman. ‘Then the king came to offer the mass penny, and in passing did his obeisance before the said body. Next the queen came to offer, dressed all in blue without a high headdress, and there she made a great obeisance and reverence to the said body, and next two of the king’s daughters came to offer in the same way.’ The daughters are not named but would surely have been the eldest – ten-year-old Elizabeth, recently betrothed to the French Dauphin, and Mary. That the queen came without a hennin – the tall pointed cone from which floated a flattering veil, or the veiled, backward-pointing ‘butterfly’ headdress – was presumably a conventional token of grief.
Another, French, account includes a fourth woman: ‘the king offered for the said prince his father and the queen and her two daughters and the countess of Richmond offered next.’ Since this account survives as a medley of late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century documents it is always possible that a later hand added the name of Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond – later, when her son Henry VII was on the throne, when she had become ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’, when her presence at any gathering would have become worthy of record and indeed tactful to do so. This could account for the fact that, apart from queen and her two daughters, she is the only woman mentioned specifically. But the blandly undescriptive words do infer just how well Margaret Beaufort was doing in trying to placate the ruling Yorkist family.
It is not recorded whether Anne, Duchess of Gloucester was at Fotheringhay, despite the conspicuous part played by her husband Richard. Her presence may have gone unremarked, as Anne Neville’s doings so often did; though surely, had she been there, she would have offered before Margaret Beaufort. Her absence may simply have been due to a pregnancy. If it were around now that Anne’s single child was born, after several years of marriage, it might have been good reason not to risk an arduous journey. In any case, there would have been no role for her in that stylised procession from the north.
There are, however, mentions of Anne in other records around this time. In 1475/6 she sent a message to the city of York, conveyed by one of her husband’s councillors, suggesting that she was able to deputise for him in his absence. In 1476 she was admitted to the sisterhood of Durham Cathedral priory. In December that year some of Richard’s payment warrants, issued from London, show purchases of furs and silk for ‘the most dear consort of the lord duke’. The following year she and Richard joined the guild of Corpus Christi at York and funded a chantry at Queens’ College, Cambridge. So there is probably no reason to read anything sinister into Anne’s absence – but one omission from the list of those present at the Fotheringhay ceremony does look more pointed.
It is hard not to read something into the apparent absence of the woman with most reason of all to be there – Cecily, Duchess of York, the dead man’s widow. It is true that royalty did not customarily attend funerals, and that a woman might in any case have no place at the actual funeral ceremony of a man. But this was not a funeral as such, and neither the king nor queen stayed away. A later account affirms Cecily’s continued affection for Fotheringhay: ‘Memorandum that the Lady Cicelye, Duchess of York mother to King Edward the iiijth, died at her castle of Berkhamstead, and was buried by [beside] her husband in the College of Fotheringhay.’ She may just have been ill – she was, after all, past sixty which was old for those times.
Maybe Cecily simply watched the ceremony,9 instead of taking part. But when Margaret Beaufort, for example, was an observer during her son’s reign, her presence would be recorded. If Cecily had indeed been absent entirely, the question has to be why.
Cecily and Elizabeth Woodville were not, in this story, the only mother and daughter-in-law who did not always agree. Perhaps Cecily did not care to take a subordinate role to the daughter-in-law she despised as a low-born interloper – not at this, of all ceremonies.
It is tempting to read between the lines of a letter written in October 1476 by a member of the Stonor family. Elizabeth Stonor writes10 to her husband of how she had attended the Duchess of Suffolk – the king’s sister Elizabeth – on a visit to Cecily Neville.
‘And also on Saturday last was I waited upon [the Duchess] again, and also from thence she waited upon my lady her Mother, and brought her to Greenwich to the King’s good grace and the queen’s: and there I saw the meeting between the King and my lady his Mother. And truly me thought it was a very good sight.’ It sounds almost as though Cecily failed to meet her daughter-in-law, even though Elizabeth Woodville was obviously at Greenwich. Worse, it sounds as though Edward’s sister had to ‘bring’ Cecily to see her son, and that the fact of her meeting her son was thought worth commenting on.
One letter perhaps written in 147411 had been to her son Richard, about a servant and whether Richard had yet fulfilled ‘your promise made unto us at Syon … praying you that no man intromitt with our said servant’s matter, saving only our counsel learned and yours, as our faithful trust is in you.’ There is the sound of a mother’s finger wagging, and more specifically in the next lines: ‘Son, we trusted you should have been at Berkhamsted with my lord my son [Edward] at his last being there with us, and if it had pleased you to come at that time, you should have been right heartily welcome. And so you shall be whensoever you shall do the same, as God knoweth, whom we beseech to have you in governance.’ Though we need read no more into it than a mother’s natural desire to see as much as possible of her son, one could also perceive a desire to bind ties in what had already long been shown up as a dangerously fractured family.
The ranks of Cecily’s children had been diminished, at the start of 1476, by the death of her eldest daughter Anne in childbirth. Four years earlier Anne had obtained what the sixteenth-century chronicler John Stow called a divorce (probably an annulment) from her estranged husband the Duke of Exeter, and married her long-standing lover, the Kentish gentleman Thomas St Leger. By contrast Cecily’s second daughter Elizabeth,12 Duchess of Suffolk, was enjoying an access of independence and influence after the death of her own formidable mother-in-law Alice Chaucer in 1475. But this particular scion of the York family seems, none the less, to have taken little personal part in political affairs. They were, on the other hand, the daily concern of Cecily’s youngest and grandest daughter, Margaret of Burgundy. And as 1477 dawned Cecily must have been worried also about her daughter across the Channel.
When she had married Duke Charles in 1468 Margaret had entered a court, and a political system, where the duchess was expected to play a comparatively active role; this despite the fact that her new husband was more than a decade older than she, strongly committed to his own rule, ferocious in war and frequently absent. Attention at first was likely to have focused on her prime duty: the provision of heirs. This Margaret would, for unknown reasons, never manage, and Charles’s existing daughter Mary remained his sole heiress. But although before Margaret’s arrival he had told his subjects that his bride was ‘ideally shaped to bear a prince’, there is no sign of the frantic and reproachful flailings after a male heir in which Margaret’s great-nephew Henry VIII of England would indulge.
Only a few years into the marriage, records of their movements show that the couple were rarely together, though relations seem to have been amicable. With Charles at the wars Margaret none the less retained enough hope to make offerings to those saints associated with childbirth and fertility: St Waudru, St Margaret of Antioch, St Colette and St Anne. In 1473 she made an unusual two-month trip to a palace designated as a place of cure and recovery; her trouble may possibly have been the loss of a child.
Alone or in company with her stepdaughter (with whom, as with her mother-in-law, she seems to have got on well), Margaret travelled indefatigably, raising men and money for her husband’s campaigns, and receiving petitions and ambassadors in his frequent absences. Her secure position survived not only the childlessness which would destroy Henry VIII’s queens, but the political turmoils in England which cast into doubt her other prime function, as living guarantor of the Anglo–Burgundian alliance.
Duke Charles, having made his own truce with the French, had been fighting on his other frontiers throughout 1476. In the frozen January of 1477 came news – filtering only slowly through to his womenfolk, and to his foreign allies – that he was dead. Immediately, Louis of France laid claim to a significant part of his lands. It was lucky that Margaret at thirty-one already had considerable experience of the swift reverses of fortune. She and her stepdaughter (Mary as the new ruling duchess, and Margaret under the title of Duchesse Mère) acted together to summon the Burgundian parliament, the Estates General, and negotiate arrangements to satisfy the complaints they had had against the rule of Duke Charles; to urge the individual cities and provinces of Burgundy to resist the French invaders; and to buy diplomatic time by sending a letter pleading for the protection due to ‘widows and orphans’. (Louis’ first response was to suggest a marriage between the twenty-year-old Duchess Mary and his seven-year-old son the Dauphin – who, of course, had two years earlier been betrothed to Elizabeth of York as part of another peace treaty.)
In the course of a fraught spring and summer the two women would achieve what they had set out to do; but things got worse before they got better. Margaret and Mary had to cope with the arrest and execution, by the Estates, of their most trusted advisers. Margaret had also, like so many widows, to battle for her dower rights, withheld on the grounds that her brother had never paid all the dowry he had promised; eventually Mary intervened on behalf of a woman who, she said, had always held ‘our person and our lands and lordships in such complete and perfect love and goodwill that we can never sufficiently repay and recompense her’.
Nor were these Margaret’s only problems. First there was a whispering campaign against her, sponsored by the French king. Before her marriage he had spread rumours about her chastity. Now he was about to spread a different story, which would have repercussions in England. Secondly, her brother Edward would not send military support and risk his own rapport with (and pension from) the French, even though Louis was attacking her dower lands.
Margaret wrote to Edward in the strongest terms, protesting that he had once made her ‘one of the most important ladies in the world’ but she was now ‘one of the poorest widows deserted by everyone, especially by you’. She implored him to send a thousand or more English archers ‘to rescue me from the King of France who does his best to reduce me to a state of beggary for the rest of my days’. Margaret was deeply dissatisfied with her brother, who did no more than write to Louis on her behalf. As events would prove, she was not a woman to take dissatisfaction lightly.
She was not the only York sibling to feel aggrieved. Just two years after the triumphant symbolism of the Fotheringhay ceremony, the Yorkist dynasty and its matriarch Cecily were racked by the fate of her second surviving son.