THIRTEEN

Mother of Griefs

Alas, I am the mother of these griefs;

Their woes are parcelled, mine is general.

Richard III, 2.2

George, Duke of Clarence, had been a disaffected troublemaker for much of his brother’s reign. For ten years he had been Edward’s heir, which had given him an exaggerated sense of entitlement. He has gone down in history as, in Shakespeare’s words, ‘false, fleeting, perjured Clarence’; and this reputation is bound up with the story of the women around him.

Clarence’s wife Isabel Neville had died at the end of 1476, less than three months after giving birth to a son. This baby, Isabel’s third living child, very shortly followed her, and (though the Tewkesbury chronicler definitely links the sad event to childbirth) rumours would soon accrue about the deaths of both mother and child.

The first effect of Isabel’s departure was to make Clarence an available widower. The Crowland chronicler reports that Margaret of Burgundy, ‘whose affections were fixed on her brother Clarence beyond any of the rest of her kindred’, now devoted her energies to reviving the old idea of a match between him and Mary of Burgundy. But, just as when the idea had first been mooted almost a decade earlier, King Edward refused his permission.

All the royal siblings may to some degree have been victims of the French king Louis, who was still trying to break up the anti-French alliance established between England and Burgundy. Now French envoys spread the story that Margaret and certain English lords were planning to have Mary kidnapped and taken to England to marry Clarence; and whispered into Edward’s ear the poisonous suggestion that Margaret and Clarence would then use Burgundian troops to seize the English throne. (Burgundy itself, in the person of Mary, had a claim to that crown – she was descended through her grandmother from John of Gaunt.) But within a couple of months of Duke Charles’s death Margaret and Mary were actively seeking the long-planned marriage between Mary and Maximilian, the Archduke of Austria and son of the Holy Roman Emperor, which finally took place in summer 1477 to the satisfaction of all parties immediately concerned.

But Clarence’s history must have made these malicious tales all too credible. Any suggestion of a stronger Anglo–Burgundian link could – assuming the stories had not been instituted by the French king himself – have broken the fragile peace with France and thrown that country back on its old alliance with the ever-troublesome Scots.¹³ But whatever the rumours, no intervention by either Louis or Margaret may have been necessary: Clarence had an almost unparalleled capacity for making trouble on his own.

In the spring of 1477 he was involved in two bizarre trials. At the first, one Ankarette Twynho, formerly a servant of Clarence’s wife but now perhaps in the Woodvilles’ sphere, was accused of having given Isabel poisoned ale – given, it was claimed, on 10 October, though improbably not causing death until 22 December. Two others were accused of having conspired with her to poison also Isabel’s baby, who died ten days later. Ankarette was snatched from her home by Clarence’s men and taken across three counties to Warwick, where he held sway. There, despite the absurdity of the charges, she was found guilty by a jury who later pleaded that Clarence had left them no choice, and executed on the spot.

A few weeks later, in an apparently unrelated case, three men were tried and convicted in London for ‘seeking the destruction of the King and Prince’, as Crowland reported, by seditious means but also by necromancy – witchcraft. At least one of the men was a close associate of Clarence’s, who later, in May, stormed out of the king’s council after having the men’s declarations of their innocence read. He was displaying a flagrant lack of respect for the due process of law, and also for the king’s authority. Crowland relates how Edward summoned the duke to Westminster and inveighed against his behaviour ‘as derogatory to the laws of the realm and most dangerous to judges and jurors throughout the kingdom’. The two had, as Crowland writes, come to look upon each other with ‘unbrotherly’ looks. In June, Clarence himself was arrested and sent to the Tower.

At the beginning of 1478 Clarence was attainted on a rhetorically elaborate charge of treasons past and present, and the parliamentary sessions in which he was tried began on 16 January. The date reflects the complicated life of the York family, for the previous day had seen, by contrast, a resplendent wedding ceremony. Early in 1476 the last Mowbray Duke of Norfolk had died, leaving only an infant daughter, Anne, and Edward had immediately seized on the heiress for betrothal to his younger son, Richard. Now, two years later, he had a good opportunity to have the marriage formally celebrated – despite the youth of the participants – in the presence of many of his nobles who had assembled for a very different purpose.

Elizabeth Woodville’s brother Anthony, Earl Rivers, led the little girl into the king’s Great Chamber where the whole court was gathered to receive her – a daunting experience for a five- or six-year-old. The next day, followed by a retinue of ladies and gentlewomen, she was led by Earl Rivers again, and the ‘Count of Lincoln’, son to Edward’s sister Elizabeth, in procession through the Queen’s Chamber, the king’s Great Chamber and the White Hall into St Stephen’s Chapel, hung with blue tapestry decorated with gold fleurs de lys, where the royal family waited under a canopy to receive her.

The king gave the bride away, largesse was flung to the crowd from gold and silver bowls brought in by the Duke of Gloucester, and a banquet, with Anne Mowbray honoured as Princess of the Feast, completed that day’s celebrations. A few days later there was a great tournament, at which the queen’s brother appeared as St Anthony the hermit, with a hermit’s house of black velvet – complete with a belltower and a bell that rang – built into his horse’s trappings. The little duchess had to award the prizes – assisted, in the interests of practicality, by the princess Elizabeth and a council of ladies.

But beneath all this ceremony the Mowbray marriage is noteworthy for the way it demonstrated Edward’s own sometimes cavalier attitude to the law. The king’s son had already been created Duke of Norfolk, anticipating presumably that it would be in the right of his tiny wife, and two Acts of Parliament were now passed to ensure that if she died before bearing children her lands would pass to her ‘husband’ rather than to her heirs-at-law. Anne Mowbray’s mother the Duchess of Norfolk, Elizabeth Talbot, urged or forced out of much to which she was entitled, seems barely to have figured in the wedding ceremony. Neither, of course, did the bridegroom’s uncle Clarence, imprisoned in the Tower only a few miles away. Convicted by parliament, Clarence was sentenced to death in the early days of February; and when Edward hesitated for ten days the Speaker of the Commons asked the House of Lords to impose the penalty. He was executed on 18 February – famously drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. Mancini wrote that ‘The mode of execution preferred in this case was, that he should die by being plunged into a jar of sweet wine’, and the story was considered plausible enough to be repeated all over Europe, by de Commynes and the Great Chronicle among others. Clarence’s daughter would be painted with a wine cask as an emblem on her bracelet. The wine has served to lend a note of comic horror to Clarence’s death – but the bare facts of the case open the door to a wealth of speculation, not least as to where the responsibility should lie.

Thomas More – writing in the next century, and always a detractor of Richard III (then still Duke of Gloucester) – claimed that some ‘wise men also ween that his drift, covertly conveyed, lacked not in helping forth his brother of Clarence to his death: which he resisted openly, howbeit somewhat (as men deemed) more faintly than he that were heartily minded to his wealth’. It is true that several of Richard’s men were in the parliament that nodded through the attainder (as well, of course, as many of the Woodvilles’ adherents); true too that, inheriting some of Clarence’s titles and offices as well as his place in the succession, he greatly benefited from Clarence’s fall. But so too did Edward, who got Clarence’s great estates and needed the money; Margaret Beaufort must have noted with interest that the Richmond earldom – which in 1471 had been granted to Clarence for his lifetime – was once again vacant. Almost everybody stood to gain from Clarence’s death.

Mancini placed the blame very differently, as a grievance that would fester and burst forth in 1483. Visiting England in Richard’s reign and perhaps susceptible to his propaganda, Mancini wrote that at this time ‘Richard Duke of Gloucester was so overcome with grief for his brother, that he could not dissimulate so well, but that he was overheard to say that he would one day avenge his brother’s death.’ He clearly blames the queen who had ‘concluded that her offspring by the king would never come to the throne, unless the duke of Clarence were removed; and of this she easily persuaded the king.’ Indeed, More too would postulate as another possible cause of Clarence’s fall ‘the Queen and the lords of her blood, which highly maligned the king’s kindred (as women commonly not of malice but of nature hate them whom their husbands love)’.

Elizabeth Woodville and her kin were, of course, always blamed for greed; and certainly the Woodvilles were not only prominent in the councils leading up to Clarence’s trial but joined in the general harvest of Clarence’s goods and offices. Mancini says it was now, with Clarence dead and Richard lying low on his own lands, that Elizabeth really started to ennoble her relatives. ‘Besides, she attracted to her party many strangers and introduced them to court, so that they alone should manage the public and private businesses of the crown, surround the king, and have bands of retainers, give or sell offices, and finally rule the very king himself.’ But as Mancini was also suggesting, there could have been another reason for her particular animosity towards Clarence at this time. His suggestion of ‘calumnies’ against her – ‘namely that according to established usage she was not the legitimate wife of the king’ – may have been just another rehashing of the old outcry against the secrecy of her marriage, her position as a widow. But it is also possible that Clarence was holding dangerous knowledge over his brother’s and sister-in-law’s heads.

One theory is that Clarence had been dropping hints about a lady called Eleanor Butler to whom, it was alleged, Edward had been pre-contracted or indeed actually married in the early 1460s – making his subsequent marriage to Elizabeth Woodville invalid. Eleanor, daughter of the great Earl of Shrewsbury,¹⁴ was a widow of rank and notable piety who had died in 1468; Edward would have met her at the very beginning of his reign. (More says that Edward boasted of having three concubines: the merriest, the holiest and the wisest harlot in the kingdom. If Jane Shore was the merriest, Eleanor might have been the holiest.) Commynes says that Edward ‘promised to marry her, provided that he could sleep with her first, and she consented’ – the same technique he practised on Elizabeth Woodville. Commynes says also that Robert Stillington (later Bishop of Bath and Wells) ‘had married them’, though his involvement would hardly have been necessary: witnessed consent and consummation alone would have sufficed. Mancini and Vergil too make reference to the story. The implication is that Stillington (who seems now to have been cast briefly into prison, possibly for something to do with the Clarence affair) had passed this lethal information either directly to Clarence or to Eleanor’s sister the Duchess of Norfolk and her husband, friends of his – the same duchess whose little daughter Anne Mowbray had just been snapped up as a royal bride.

But evidence for all this is circumstantial: Eleanor’s arranging for the disposition of her property in the form open to a married woman, rather than that possible only for a widow; and the coincidence of Stillington’s career now and later. Against that, there are no signs that, after Eleanor’s death, Edward and Elizabeth attempted to regularise their liaison. Thomas More, after all, muddied the waters considerably by saying that Edward was pre-contracted not to Eleanor but to another of his mistresses by whom he had had a child, a married woman of lower rank called Elizabeth Lucy.¹⁵ The question is whether he did so from ignorance, or in order to discredit a story so potentially damaging to the Tudor dynasty.

Probably the most that can be said is that Edward’s pattern of behaviour with his women makes it impossible simply to dismiss the tale. But whether the allegation is true or false, if Clarence were indeed spreading this rumour it lends weight to the idea that Elizabeth Woodville believed him a threat to her children. The story would certainly reappear, greatly to her sons’ detriment, a few years down the line.

Where did the other women in the family stand – and what, more particularly, was Cecily Neville’s attitude, faced with this lethal rift among her children? The short answer is that we do not know. Crowland relates that in parliament ‘not a single person uttered a word against the duke, except the king; not one individual made answer to the king except the duke’. It is said that Edward later lamented that ‘not one creature’ interceded for Clarence. But women, of course, would not be speaking in a parliament anyway: whatever was said by them, was said behind closed doors and was not recorded. At any rate, she made no cries of protest loud enough to catch the ear of any contemporary observer. It is often said that it was Cecily’s pleading which won Clarence the right to choose his own manner of death, but evidence is hard to find. (The contemporary chronicler Jean de Roye wrote in his journal, the Chronique scandaleuse, that the dreadful sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering had been commuted ‘by the great prayer and request of the mother’, but his nineteenth-century editor Bernard de Mondrot pointed out that the words ‘of the mother’ were added between the lines, and in a later hand.)

Certainly Cecily had been present when, the day before the parliament began that was to try Clarence, the little Duke of York was married to Anne Mowbray. Perhaps she had at last given up on this particular branch of the Yorkist tree. It was, after all, Clarence who had impugned her chastity. One of the grounds on which he was accused was that he had ‘upon one of the falsest and most unnatural coloured pretences that man might imagine, falsely and untruly noised, published and said, that the King our Sovereign Lord was a Bastard, and not begotten to reign upon us’.

Others have seen this very differently. One theory is that it was Cecily who offered Clarence the idea of her adultery, in pursuit of the family good. This was a world where, as one author puts it,¹⁶ other loyalties might sometimes have to take precedence over ‘the sacredness of each individual life’; and that conflict would be even more crucial for the York family in the years ahead. These were the stark choices Cecily would have to contemplate – not once, but repeatedly. It would seem she accepted Clarence’s death. But it may have significantly altered her life.

From this point there are fewer mentions of Cecily taking part in court rituals. Naturally, the business of running her estates continued. Besides her main residence, ‘our Castle of Berkhamsted’, letters are signed from ‘our place at Baynard’s Castle’ and from the priory at Merton. She never ceased to exercise her good ladyship¹⁷ – to administer her lands and insist on her dignities. One letter from her begins: ‘By the rightful inheritor’s wife of the realm of England and of France, and lordship of Ireland, the king’s mother, Duchess of York.’ Another sent a stinging reproof to an officer she felt had fallen down over the administration of her East Anglian lands. He should amend on his ‘faithful and true devoir [duty]’, and ‘fail not hereof as you will avoid the awful peril that may ensue with our great displeasure and heavy ladyship’.

She can be glimpsed¹⁸ licensing seven men in Thaxted to form a fraternity in 1481; joining in Edward’s petition on behalf of a Carthusian monastery to which, the letter urged, the king’s mother ‘has a singular devotion’; requesting absolution for a clerk of the diocese of York notwithstanding his ‘bigamy and irregularity’. But at Berkhamsted she seems to have adopted a life of increasing piety. A few years later¹⁹ Cecily’s daily regime was recorded at length for posterity.

She is accustomed to arise at seven o’clock and has ready her chaplain to say with her matins of the day, and matins of Our Lady; and when she is full ready she has a low mass in her chamber, and after mass she takes something to recreate [recruit, restore] nature; and so goes to the chapel, hearing the divine service and two low masses; thence to dinner, during the time thereof she has a reading of holy matter.…

After dinner she gives audience to all such as has any matter to show to her by the space of one hour; and then she sleeps one quarter of an hour, and after she has slept she continues in prayer to the first peal of evensong; then she drinks wine or ale at her pleasure. Forthwith her chaplain is ready to say with her both evensongs; and after the last peal she goes to the chapel and hears evensong by note; from thence to supper, and in the time of supper she recites the reading that was had at dinner to those that be in her presence.

After supper she disposes herself to be familiar with her gentlewomen, to the following of honest mirth; and one hour before her going to bed, she takes a cup of wine, and after that goes to her private closet, and takes her leave of God for all night, making end of her prayers for that day; and by eight of the clock she is in bed. I trust to Our Lord’s mercy that this noble princess thus divides her hours to His high pleasure.

Cecily had chosen what the age called the mixed life:²⁰ the ‘medled [sic] life that is to say sometime active sometime contemplative’, as it was described by the late fourteenth-century northern cleric and author Nicholas Love, whose translation of the Life of Christwas in Cecily’s library alongside numerous other devotional works. So too was the Letter on the Mixed Life written by Love’s associate Walter Hilton, while The Abbey of the Holy Ghost (of which Cecily’s daughter Margaret of Burgundy owned a copy) was written to teach those ‘unable to leave the world how they might build an abbey in their soul and keep the rules of an order in their heart’. Cecily’s was an English, a less intellectual, version of the devotio moderna which her daughter espoused in its full reforming fervour.

Cecily also owned copies of De Infantia Salvatoris (apocryphal stories of the miracles of Christ’s infancy) and of the ever-popular Legenda Aurea, the Golden Legend. But she also owned copies of the lives and visions of the great female mystics like Matilda of Hackenborn, Saint Bridget of Sweden and Saint Catherine of Siena. It was St Catherine who advised those who wished to follow her example, but were still constrained by the demands of the world: ‘Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee.’

Cecily’s piety has traditionally been seen almost as a psychological alibi that allowed her to sail tranquilly above the turmoils of her family. She must often have needed the sense of a special relationship with God, and might have reflected on the biblical stories of brothers’ struggles: Esau and Jacob, whose mother Rebecca showed him how to snatch his elder brother’s birthright; Joseph, whose brothers conspired to kill him; David, chosen to be the king of the Jews above his elder brother Elijah.

It is conceivable that Cecily found in her faith an angry affirmation of, and vindication for, the vicissitudes imposed upon her family and those they had imposed upon themselves. In the years of Cecily’s childhood, Thomas à Kempis had written in his Imitation of Christ of the rashness of relying on anyone but God, of the triumph in the Last Judgement of the oppressed over the oppressor: ‘Then shall rightwise men stand in great [constaunce] against them that have anguished them and oppressed them.’ At the very least Cecily must have needed the power of prayer to clear and focus the mind; to achieve that state of integration and acceptance that in the Middle Ages could only be couched in spiritual terms.

Like many devout women, Cecily probably made a particular identification with the Virgin Mary: relevant for a mother who lost two sons to political strife. St Bridget’s prayer of the Fifteen Oes specifically encourages the devout to share the pain of Christ and of the Virgin; a few years later, Margaret Beaufort would collaborate with Elizabeth of York to commission a printed version from Caxton. Religious enthusiasm was a powerful link between almost all these women: a socially and morally acceptable way, perhaps, of evading or triumphing over other divides.