fn1 Eighteen years later Ferdinand of Aragon was shocked to hear that his wife Isabella had not only had herself proclaimed hereditary monarch of Castile, but paraded through Segovia with a drawn sword carried before her. ‘I have never’, he protested, ‘heard of a queen who usurped this masculine attribute.’
fn2 Perhaps, even, it would not be surprising if Margaret the devout turned with a sense of angry recognition to the religious theories of the day that held maidenhood, virginity, to be the most perfect time of a woman’s life – attempted, in her later rejection of the married state, almost to recreate it. Certainly the iconography was all around – the Virgin Mary, the Maid of Orléans, the Pearl Maiden of poetry, even Galahad and the Grail. The nobly born virgin martyrs – St Catherine of Alexandria, Cecilia, Barbara, Agnes, Agatha, and St Margaret – had become the most popular saints in the England of the day.
fn3 If we want a suggestion of what Cecily might have hoped her relation to Edward would be, we could look to the letter Alice Chaucer’s husband Suffolk had left for his son: ‘I charge you, my dear son, always as ye be bounden by the commandment of god to do, to love, to worship your lady and mother, and also that ye obey always her commandments, and to believe her counsels and advices in all your works …’
fn4 As so often, a look at the personalities offers a slightly different perspective: this Duchess of Norfolk, Katherine Neville, Cecily Neville’s elder sister, had been married off by her father in 1412, in the chapel of Raby Castle, to the Duke of Norfolk. She mulcted his estates after he died; then married a servant in the household; then married a third time to a Viscount Beaumont. She would outlive all her husbands, the last included. It is just possible she – probably in her sixties, rather than her late seventies – was not entirely the passive victim here.
fn5 There had been Henry IV’s dowager queen, Joan of Navarre, in 1419 briefly imprisoned on the accusation of it. There had been Eleanor Cobham, Humfrey of Gloucester’s wife (and thus once Jacquetta’s sister-in-law, in the days when she had been Duchess of Bedford) charged in 1441 by her husband’s enemies and sentenced to imprisonment for life, as well as humiliating public penance.
fn6 Elizabeth of York would own Fotheringhay eventually, and her death would mark an end to its warm association with the royal family. Elizabeth of York’s granddaughter Elizabeth I would have another of her descendants beheaded there, and now the name of Fotheringhay will for ever be associated with that of the Scots queen Mary.
fn7 Elizabeth had, he said, no need to fear since there was ‘no man here that will be at war with women’ … and as for the rights of sanctuary: ‘What if a man’s wife will take sanctuary because she list to run away from her husband? I would ween if she can allege no other cause, he may lawfully, without any displeasure to St Peter, take her out of St Peter’s church by the arm.’
fn8 When the rule was finally broken by Queen Mary in 1937, her attendance at the coronation of George VI was taken as evidence of her strong views on his brother’s Abdication.
fn9 In Malory, Tristan is an Arthurian knight fatally in love with a lady, whose mother’s brother he has unfortunately killed.
fn10 Cannonballs have been found more than a mile from what was originally believed to be the site.
fn11 It is disputed whether the boy was born in 1474 or 1475.
fn12 Also in February 1507, several years after her marriage, Margaret in Scotland gave birth to a son, so it is possible her husband James, unlike Edmund Tudor long ago, had delayed consummating the marriage until she was mature. She was none the less dangerously ill after the birth, but her husband went seven days on foot to a famous shrine to pray for her recovery. This child, like several others, died young; but Margaret’s one surviving son would go on to become King James V, father to Mary Queen of Scots. Margaret’s husband, however, died at Flodden in 1513, fighting against an English army. After his death she was appointed regent for her baby son, albeit that some argued this was against Scottish tradition. But after making a controversial second marriage to the Earl of Angus she was demoted to a lesser title, albeit one with resonance in her family – that of ‘My Lady the King’s mother’.
fn13 Mary’s marriage to Charles would not in the end proceed. She would instead be married by her brother Henry VIII to the ageing French king Louis XII, and dance him into his grave.