CHAPTER 16
‘An hault courage above the nature of her sex’
In his book of hours for March 1430, René of Anjou noted on the twenty-fourth that his second daughter, Lady Marguerite, had been born. The winter that year had been so bitter that wolves stalked the suburbs of Paris, a fitting symbol for the battleground that western Europe had become. The ancestral Anjou heritage of baby Marguerite was as grand as it was complex. The Plantagenet branch of the house of Anjou had taken England to the height of its recent Continental power under Henry V, whose son Henry VI asserted his right to the crowns of both England and France. Marguerite’s great-great-grandfather was the King Jean of France who had been entertained so courteously by Edward II’s queen; his second son, Louis I, had brought up various hereditary claims and eventually styled himself Emperor of Constantinople, King of Jerusalem, Mallorca and Cyprus, titles ‘that were as grandiloquent as they were devoid of substance’.1 Interfamilial networks also related Marguerite to the rulers of Sicily, Naples, Provence, Hungary, Poland, Moldavia, Wallachia and the Dalmatian provinces. Her immensely capable paternal grandmother, Yolande of Aragon, the bride of Louis II, succeeded in betrothing her only daughter to Charles VII of France, who was thus Marguerite’s uncle by marriage as well as her third cousin, but the royal connection by which she was more significantly affected was the contentious claim of her father, René of Anjou, to the kingdom of Naples.
The Angevin claim in Naples had been established by Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily, the husband of Eleanor of Provence’s sister Beatrice. By the early fifteenth century, two branches of the house of Anjou were contesting the crown, but a resolution was offered by Queen Joanna II of Naples, who adopted Louis III of Anjou, René’s elder brother, as her declared heir. Louis III died in 1434, followed the next year by Queen Joanna, so all his rights devolved upon René. The father of four-year-old Marguerite was hardly in a position to celebrate at the time, being imprisoned on the orders of the Duke of Burgundy, but luckily for him, he had chosen in his wife Isabelle of Lorraine a woman as adventurous and loyal as his own mother, and the twenty-four-year-old Queen of Naples set off to reclaim her husband’s birthright. Some stories have it that she was accompanied by her young daughter, but Marguerite stayed at home in Anjou with her grandmother Yolande and her nurse, Tiphaine la Majine, who had also cared for her father and aunt Marie, and whose tomb may be seen at Saumur, holding them as swaddled babies.
By 1438, both Marguerite’s parents were successfully established in Naples, where they enjoyed four glorious years until the city fell to Alfonso of Aragon, and the erstwhile royal couple shuffled back to their impoverished French estates, exhausted and penniless. It was essential that a good match be arranged for their daughter, and the early negotiations surrounding Marguerite’s betrothal provide a particularly naked example of the way in which aristocratic women were used as bargaining tools. One candidate was the Count of St Pol, whose father, Jean of Luxembourg, was engaged in buying the county of Guise from René for 20,000 pounds; another was the Count of Charolais, to whom René owed part of the ransom for his release from the Duke of Burgundy’s incarceration, a debt that could be offset by a marriage settlement. The recently elected Emperor, Frederick of Hapsburg, also showed some interest in twelve-year-old Marguerite, and was received at Saumur by Yolande, who touchingly put on the best display she could muster, ordering 330 crowns-worth of gold, violet and crimson cloth and fur trimmings for Marguerite’s dresses. Yolande died that autumn, content in her belief that she had arranged a great match for her granddaughter.
However, in April 1444, René met William de la Pole, the Earl of Suffolk, at the court of his brother-in-law Charles at Montils, near Tours, where Suffolk proposed for Marguerite on behalf of King Henry VI of England. Such a match would gain René Charles’s support in dealing with discontented subjects. Metz had recently rebelled in protest at excessive taxation and the nonpayment of interest on the loan René had raised to pay off his ransom to the Duke of Burgundy, and an English marriage, with the corollary of a truce between England and France, would release Charles’s forces to help him. Charles was famously stingy (when he became Dauphin he had no treasury, barely the scraps of an army and it was said he could not even afford shoes), and the price he demanded from the English for his niece was high: the counties of Maine and Anjou itself were to transfer their allegiance to the French crown. Moreover, Henry would have to meet the costs of Marguerite’s wedding journey and accept the farcical dowry of René’s claims to Mallorca and Menorca, which he might conquer in right of his wife if he got round to it. René was a king without a country, and his reverses in Italy had absorbed what little of his fortune and future revenues were not mortgaged to pay the Burgundy debt.
Nevertheless, the wedding was a splendid affair. Marguerite and her mother had arrived at Tours from Angers, where they stayed at the abbey of Beaumont les Tours. The night before, 22 May 1444, a treaty securing a truce between England and France was signed, guaranteed until 1 April 1446. The betrothal was celebrated in the church of St Martin, attended by the King and Queen of France, René of Anjou and Isabelle of Lorraine, the Dukes of Calabria, Brittany and Alençon, the Dauphine, Margaret of Scotland, the Counts of St Pol and Vendôme and Marguerite’s uncle, Charles Count of Maine, though not by the bridegroom. After curtseying to the King of France, Marguerite was presented with the marriage licence (a provisional document allowing the couple to marry even though they were within the prohibited degrees; the real licence took one year), by the papal legate, Monsignor de Mont Dieu, bishop of Brescia, and the ring was placed on her finger. At the feast afterwards, at the abbey of St Julien, the fourteen-year-old bride was treated with the status of an English queen.
Marguerite remained at home long enough to see Metz submit satisfactorily to 30,000 French troops sent by Charles VII and to witness the marriage of her sister Yolande at Nancy. She then set off on the journey to her new country with an escort of 1,500. Two leagues from Nancy, she wished her uncle Charles a tearful goodbye, then continued on to Bar-le-Duc to see Isabelle and René. In Paris in mid-March, she heard Mass at Nôtre Dame and was presented with relics from the treasury. At St Denis she was formally handed over to Suffolk and the party sailed to Rouen, the capital of the English territories in northern France, where she was saluted by 600 archers as Richard, Duke of York and regent of France, came to meet her. Marguerite was presented with a gift from Henry, a beautiful palfrey draped in crimson velvet sewn with gold roses, then rode in a carriage to the Hôtel de Ville for yet another banquet, although she was unwell and her place had to be taken by Lady Suffolk. On 9 April, Marguerite’s ship, captained by one Thomas Adam, arrived at Portchester. The vessel had inevitably endured a terrible storm, losing both its masts, and though the people of Portchester had tried to provide a welcome, heaping carpets on the beach, the new Queen was able only to stagger, ill and raggedly dressed, to a nearby cottage, where she promptly fainted.
Marguerite of Anjou met her husband, King Henry VI, for the first time on 14 April 1445 at Southampton. A week later they were married privately, at Titchfield Abbey by William Aicough, bishop of Salisbury and royal confessor. What did they make of each other in their earliest days as a couple? At twenty-three, Henry had been king for his entire life. Unlike other aristocratic boys he had not been brought up among his peers, but had lived a rather sad, solitary life, lonely among the older men who made up his household. He was already displaying the deep piety and lack of worldliness that made him seem more fit for life as a monk than as a king, a view expressed by a papal envoy as early as 1437. Marguerite’s mother and grandmother had provided her with examples of strong, influential women who had fought hard for their husbands’ rights. Not unlike Henry, René was a dreamy character. He particularly loved painting – he worked on a portrait of Philip of Burgundy even while detained in the man’s prison – and it was said that he was so underwhelmed when he heard the news of his inheritance that he barely glanced up from the manuscript he was illuminating. Yolande and Isabelle of Lorraine had made the best of what power they had in an essentially masculine world, so perhaps quiet, docile Henry aroused a protective instinct in his young wife, a desire to offer the decisive support she had seen provided by her female relatives. If Henry responded to an incipient dominating tendency in her personality, it may have reassured him, as he had been bossed about for ever. By the time Marguerite made her formal entry into London on 28 May, Henry is described as being ‘wildly in love’.2
One romantic story about the couple’s first meeting comes from Raffaelo de Negra, a correspondent of the Duchess of Milan. Henry supposedly disguised himself as a squire and brought Marguerite a letter ‘from the King’, so that he could gaze at her while she read it, as he believed that watching a woman read was the best way to observe her.
Marguerite was crowned at Westminster on 30 May. For her journey from the Tower she wore a white damask dress decorated with gold and a gold and pearl coronet set with jewels set on her loose hair. The fact that the pageants enacted to celebrate her arrival were in English indicates that Marguerite could understand something of her new country’s language, but they were perhaps more remarkable for the two themes on which they concentrated: peace and power. A figure of ‘Plenty’ welcomed her as a bringer of ‘wealth, joy and abundance’ and she was compared to the dove who came to Noah after the Flood and to the Virgin as Mary, Queen of Heaven. Comparison with the Virgin was a frequent theme of such pageants, but it is notable that those prepared for Marguerite concentrated less on the queen’s maternal role and focused so strongly on that of ‘peace-weaver’. At Leadenhall, Marguerite was greeted by ‘Dame Grace’, who announced herself as ‘God’s Vicar General’. The personification of such an important figure as a woman suggests that Marguerite was expected to be more than a humble supplicant for the King’s grace, rather someone who might be capable of assisting him in his judgements. Does this betray a degree of uneasiness about Henry’s qualities as king, and a hope that Marguerite might be able to compensate for his deficiencies? At least one scholar has concluded that ‘the surprisingly powerful image of queenship conveyed in these particular pageants may have reflected contemporary concerns about Henry’s inability to govern’.3
The political purpose of Marguerite’s marriage became even more explicit with the arrival of a French embassy just a few months after her coronation, in July 1445. Its purpose was the cession of Maine, which Suffolk had conceded as part of Marguerite’s marriage contract. Henry dithered, unable to entirely resist the aggressive elements in his council, though the French demands were reasonable: usufruct of Maine for Charles of Anjou’s life in exchange for ten years’ revenues. Eventually, a twenty-year alliance was proposed, and a second French party arrived in October to discuss this, but this time Suffolk prevaricated. Impatiently, Marguerite wrote directly to her uncle in December, and on the twenty-second an agreement was finalised, whereby the truce would continue and Maine would be handed over in April 1446. The letter was given under the King’s signet and contained the phrase: ‘To please the King of France and at the request of his wife’. Margaret’s precise role in this is not known, but it has been suggested that the peace initiative was not Henry’s and that the letter was supervised, if not written, by Suffolk himself.4 Marguerite’s name might be present as a diplomatic courtesy, showing that she was fulfilling her intended role in her marriage, or she may indeed have been working to bring Henry round.
Certainly, the next year finds Marguerite writing to Charles regarding the idea that Edward, Earl of March, son of the Duke of York, should marry Princess Madeleine of France: ‘In that you pray and exhort us perseveringly to hold our hand towards my most redoubted Lord that on his part he may still be inclined to the benefit of peace, may it please you to know that in truth we are employed at it and shall be with good heart so far as it shall be possible.’ Elsewhere, Marguerite concentrates her efforts on the restitution of Maine and on maintaining Henry’s commitment to peace. In these early gestures at diplomacy, however unsubstantiated her real influence at the time, Marguerite reveals a degree of naïveté, an impatience with ambassadorial feints, that betrays a failure to understand how delicate mendacity can be part of the art of negotiation. In trying to achieve her ends explicitly and directly, she appears not to realise that her actions could easily be misconstrued as treacherous meddling.
As Marguerite took her first steps into politics, she was becoming aware of a situation which had slowly dawned on the English magnates in the years before her marriage, and which may well have been hinted at in her coronation pageant. Quite simply, King Henry was never going to grow up. In the 1440s, the chroniclers John Hardyng and John Capgrave were already commenting on the King’s peculiar lack of energy and decisiveness, while records of ‘treasonable’ statements show that many people – even if they only said so when they were drunk – thought he was retarded. Modern historians have debated the implications of his alleged apathy, and there is some consensus that he did make his own wishes heard in both foreign affairs and domestic grants during the 1440s. A case can be made either for Henry pursuing a considered strategy of peace or for his apparent pacifism being merely the consequence of inertia. Either way, it was becoming increasingly evident that it was Suffolk who was governing, Suffolk who presented an appearance of authority to the world – an authority that the King himself conspicuously lacked.
Marguerite found herself in an unusual and isolated position. As the symbolism of her coronation had made clear, the primary duty of the queen was to produce an heir to the throne, but two years after her wedding she had not yet become pregnant. Whether Henry was a saint or merely a simpleton, he did not seem very interested in sex. His chaplain, John Blackman, recounts an incident at Christmastime when: ‘A certain great lord brought before him a dance or show of young ladies with bared bosoms who were to dance in that guise before the King, perhaps to prove him or to entice his youthful mind. But the King was not blind to it, not unaware of the devilish wile, and spurned the delusion, and very angrily averted his eyes, turned his back upon them and went out of his chamber, saying “Fie, fie, for shame.”’
Blackman’s description of Henry needs to be viewed with caution, as it was written under the auspices of Henry VII, who had an interest in demonstrating that his Lancastrian predecessor had saintly tendencies. Hagiography aside, if Henry’s piety was offended by cavorting hussies, he was also suspicious of relations with his legal wife. His spiritual counsellor, the bishop of Salisbury, was accused by some of interfering in the royal marriage by advising the King not to go near his wife. Marguerite would have been highly conscious of the imperative to produce a child, and thus frustrated by any sexual neglect on her husband’s part. Henry’s pious vagueness was not unaffectionate, but while there was no heir, her own position remained uncertain. Suffolk was in every way a contrast to her husband, a decisive, paternal figure, and moreover one of the few people to whom she had been close since her wedding. There were rumours that they were lovers, and though again these are unsubstantiated, Marguerite was careless in allowing their political alliance to be displayed so openly.
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the King’s uncle and the only living brother of Henry V, was a potential threat to both Marguerite and Suffolk. As heir presumptive, he stood to gain the crown if Marguerite remained childless and, as one of the strongest opponents of the 1444 peace settlement, he was angry and resentful of the Maine agreement, seeing it as a betrayal of his brother’s glorious legacy. On 10 February Henry and Marguerite opened Parliament in Bury St Edmunds, away from Gloucester’s centre of support in London and one of the focal points of Suffolk’s interest. When Gloucester arrived on 18 February, he was arrested by the Queen’s steward, Viscount Beaumont, and taken into custody to await trial. Five days later he was found dead in his lodgings. Suffolk had the body exposed to prove that Gloucester had not been injured, and possibly the Duke had died of a stroke, but rumours of hot spits and smothering with feather beds were more satisfactory to political gossips. Marguerite’s role in the Gloucester plot was soon perceived as the fruit of her relationship with Suffolk. She had ‘asked, then cajoled, then begged’5 Henry to have his uncle arrested, on Suffolk’s advice that he had been planning to seize Henry and herself, imprison them and take the crown for himself.
Gloucester was not the only one to be disgusted at the ‘sorry tale of dishonesty, underhand dealing, vacillation and mismanagement’ of French affairs.6 Still favouring Suffolk’s policies (or complying with them), Henry made him a duke, but by 1449 Charles VII had grown weary of English promises and machinations. He took matters into his own hands by invading Normandy in July. By October, Rouen was lost, in April the following year the English suffered a devastating defeat at Formigny and by August the whole province had fallen. In spite of Marguerite’s vigorous opposition to attempts to impeach Suffolk, who was formally named in Parliament as the culprit of this national disgrace, in January 1450 he was imprisoned in the Tower to await trial in February, though Henry did rouse himself to intervene and persuade Suffolk’s accusers to accept a five-year banishment.
By now, the country was in uproar. In January, Adam Moleyns, bishop of Chichester, keeper of the Privy Seal and one of Suffolk’s two closest associates, was murdered by a mob at Portsmouth. The men of Kent had taken up arms, and the terrified government banned the carrying of weapons in London and the south-east, an order as fearful as it was impractical. Suffolk was attacked as he left the Tower, but permitted a six-week respite before embarking on his exile on 30 April. On 2 May, his ships were surrounded and he was taken aboard the Nicholas of the Tower. A rusty sword proclaimed his last privilege as a peer and his headless body was delivered to Dover.
Officially, Suffolk’s death was treated as a crime, just as Humphrey of Gloucester’s had not been, and the unruly rabble of Kent was blamed. The Kentish response was the uprising that became known as Jack Cade’s rebellion. In June, the bishop of Salisbury, the last living member of the Suffolk ‘triumvirate’, was hauled from the Wiltshire church where he was saying Mass and killed. The rebels were in London in early July, brandishing their manifesto, the ‘Complaint of the Commons of Kent’, while Henry and Marguerite took refuge at Kenilworth. Two thousand pardons were issued to the rebels who massed at Blackheath, which gives a sense of the numbers involved, and though Jack Cade himself was put to death on 12 July and order restored, the first six months of 1450 had provided a horrifying example of how precarious Henry’s authority had become, and how easy it might be to overturn it.
*
On the Feast of the Epiphany 1451, the King and Queen were about to take their seats for dinner when the steward of the household regretfully informed them that there was none, as the court purveyors refused to deliver any more food on credit. The deplorable state of Henry VI’s finances was a consequence of the political and administrative incompetence that had brought about the crisis on the Continent and the frightening unrest in England. The truce negotiated on the King’s marriage ought to have permitted England to reassert its strong position in Normandy, but Henry’s poor leadership and the mangled diplomacy of long-term peace arrangements wasted this opportunity. A tax had been voted in for 1445–9 with a view to providing an extra 30,000 pounds a year to pay for defence, but taxpayers were infuriated to discover that this had dribbled away into the household accounts and were disinclined to pay more. Revenues fell as expenses increased and funds were divided incompetently between Normandy and the other French territories with the result that by 1449 the garrison of Calais, the King’s most powerful standing force, was owed 20,000 pounds in wages.
Marguerite was both directly and indirectly involved in this state of affairs. Suffolk had spent the incredible sum of £5,573 17s 5d during the period he had spent in France organising her wedding and overseeing her return journey, the magnificence of which was designed to impress Henry’s dignity upon the French, but which he could ill afford. Further expenses were incurred by the preparation of Marguerite’s lodgings: there had been no queen in England for twenty years and the royal apartments at Westminster presented a rather sorry appearance. Henry engaged William Cleve, the clerk of works at Westminster, to build a new suite of rooms at Eltham, ‘honourable for the Queen’s lodging’,7 comprising a hall, scullery, saucery and serving area, so that Marguerite would have somewhere to entertain.
Marguerite had no dowry to offset such extravagance, and her management of her household suggests an almost defiant pride, a refusal to economise and thus to acknowledge her relatively impoverished status. In 1444, household expenses rose from 8,000 pounds to 27,000, and while a great proportion of this vast expenditure had nothing to do with Marguerite, it is notable that expenses for the Queen’s chamber in the year 1452 were 1,719 pounds in comparison with 919 for 1466 in the following reign. Marguerite was not the first queen to be plagued with debt, but it seemed at first that she was well provided for financially. Her dower settlement brought her 3,000 pounds in total from various resources of the duchy of Lancaster estates, 1,000 from the customs at Southampton, just over 1,000 from the duchy of Cornwall and a direct allowance of £1,657 17s 11d from the royal exchequer. In addition, she could claim queens-gold and, after Gloucester was removed, she was given a further 500 marks from his duchy of Lancaster holdings. However, none of these resources was particularly reliable: in 1452-3, for example, Marguerite received only £53 is 14d in queens-gold, and a large part of this was unpaid debt carried over from previous years. Of fifty-nine claims for that period, only sixteen were paid. She constantly battled to stabilise her income, attempting to trade her rights at the exchequer for the more solid security of land, and even venturing into trade with a licence to transport wool for sale tax-free. The customs payments from Southampton were tardy, and Marguerite was obliged to write sternly to John Somerton, one of the officials, to remind him of his duty: ‘We desire and pray you and also exhort and require you, that, of such money as is due to us, at Michaelmas term last past, of our dower, assigned to be paid of the customers of Southampton by your hands, you will do your pain and diligence that we may be contented and paid in all haste . . . and that you fail not hereof as we trust, and you think to stand in continuance of the favour of our good grace and to eschew our displeasure.’
Marguerite was justifiably active in pursuing her financial rights, but in the process she inevitably acquired a reputation for both avarice and extravagance. However, this judgement should be considered against one of the achievements of that ‘extravagance’: the restoration of the royal court. One of the Queen’s wedding gifts was a French-made collection of romances presented to her by the Earl of Shrewsbury, John Talbot. The frontispiece features Henry and Marguerite crowned, with Talbot kneeling before them, the King’s chamberlain and counsellors grouped behind him and Marguerite’s ladies watching the presentation. Peeking from behind the chamber walls are enormous daisies, Marguerite’s emblem. After the frequent illnesses of Henry IV, the long absences of Henry V and the minority of Henry VI, the court had dwindled to little more than the King’s place of business, rather than the fascinating, cultured and romantic environment Talbot’s frontispiece imagines. As J.L. Laynesmith comments: ‘The combination of romances and treatises on chivalry and government within the book itself were . . . entirely appropriate as a wedding gift to a woman whose marriage signified her King’s entry into mature kingship and with that the re-establishment of the English court.’8
In August and September of 1450, the ‘new’ court received two men who would dominate the struggle for power around the King in the next few years. Edmund Beaufort, whose love affair with Catherine de Valois had caused such a scandal twenty years before, had now succeeded to the dukedom of Somerset and was the King’s closest living male relative. Like Somerset, Richard, Duke of York was descended from Edward III, and given the attainder on descendants of John of Gaunt’s mistress Katherine Swynford inheriting, his claim to the throne was arguably stronger than Somerset’s, despite the fact that he was descended from Edmund of Langley, the younger brother of Somerset’s grandfather Gaunt. With Suffolk disposed of, Somerset and York were set for a bitter rivalry as to which of them should control the King and, in the event that Marguerite remained childless, the succession. York was disgusted by the losses in France, for which he held Somerset responsible as lieutenant, a post he himself had coveted. There was a strong feeling, reflected in the November Parliament, that York, who had been absent as lieutenant of Ireland during the Normandy debacle, should now take up his rightful place as the nation’s premier aristocrat and its greatest magnate, but it was Somerset who was awarded the post of constable of England, and York’s attempts to advise Henry were ignored.
Events in France could only add to York’s rancour. By 30 June 1451, Bordeaux had surrendered to the French, Gascony was almost lost and the French armies were moving north to Calais. Henry was sufficiently galvanised to declare that he would lead an expedition to recover his Aquitainian inheritance himself, but it came to nothing, and York was increasingly convinced that Somerset was poisoning the King against him and leading England towards chaos. York attempted to win supporters for reform in a series of open letters that were sent around the country, inveighing against the ‘envy, malice and untruth’ of the Duke of Somerset and setting out York’s manifesto against him: ‘To the intent that every man shall know my purpose . . . I, after long sufferance and delays, it not being my will or intent to displease my sovereign lord, but seeing that the said Duke ever prevails and rules about the King’s person and that by this means the land is likely to be destroyed, am fully determined to proceed in all haste against him with the help of my kinsmen and friends.’9
It was not quite a declaration of war, but York was risking a charge of treason. On 1 March 1451, his party met Henry and Somerset at Blackheath. Despite his wealth, the extent of his support and the popularity of his cause, York made a poor showing. The magnates, with the exception of Lord Cobham and the Earl of Devon, had come out for Henry. York made his case against Somerset, demanding that the Duke be arrested and tried for his mismanagement of the French war. Henry made some gesture of consent, but Somerset remained obstinately by his side, and in fact it was York who was escorted back to London like a prisoner and made to swear a humiliating public oath of allegiance at St Paul’s.
After this defeat, York withdrew from politics for a time, but it seemed as though his concerns were justified. The lack of any real central authority meant landowners felt justified in taking the law into their own hands and disturbances broke out in Derbyshire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, East Anglia, Devon and Bedfordshire. In South Wales Richard Neville, the new Earl of Warwick, was engaged in what amounted to a private war against Somerset, while the two great northern dynasties, the Nevilles and the Percies, were at daggers drawn in the North Riding of Yorkshire. There was no comfort to be found in Gascony. In August 1453, despite an earlier English rally which had retaken Bordeaux, the English were subjected to another crushing defeat. Worse still, Henry appeared to have finally lost what little there was of his mind.
For Marguerite, this should have been a joyful year, as it became clear in the spring that, finally, the Queen was expecting a child. The state of catatonic insensibility that overcame her husband during her pregnancy suggests that it may have been linked to his inability to cope with the ramifications of his sexuality, but whatever the reason for his ‘madness’, he was utterly unavailable to support or counsel Marguerite as the birth drew near. Descriptions of his symptoms suggest his disease was inherited from his grandfather, Charles VI, as for two months Henry remained at Clarendon, unable to move or speak and apparently incapable of recognising anyone. Meanwhile, Somerset scrabbled desperately to discover an alternative to the correct procedure, which would have been to invite York to take the King’s place in the government. On 13 October Marguerite gave birth to a son, Prince Edward. Defiantly, she chose Somerset as godfather.
That autumn, York had come to an accommodation with the ambitious Earl of Warwick. York offered to help him in his feud with the Percies in the north in return for the backing of the mighty Neville family. In December, Somerset was seized in Marguerite’s apartments and imprisoned in the Tower to answer the old charges of his conduct of the war in France. York’s successful manoeuvrings now brought Marguerite to centre stage. As mother of the future king, she could now expect to have some authority in the government and, with Somerset locked up, his supporters adopted her as their leader. Marguerite was deeply suspicious of York, who would be heir presumptive if her baby were to die, and she was determined that he should not act as regent while Henry remained incapable. Boldly, she made a list of provisions for the forthcoming February Parliament, the first of which was that she, not York, should govern the country. She demanded control over the appointments of the chancellor, the treasurer and the keeper of the Privy Seal as well as all officers for the shires. A party of twelve councillors rode to Windsor, where the King was being cared for, to see if they could get some kind of answer from him, but it was useless. He did not even know his own child.
Marguerite’s hopes were thwarted when the increasingly desperate council appointed York as ‘Protector’. Baby Edward had been created Prince of Wales, but for the next year Marguerite had to live in isolation at Windsor, with the uncertainty of whether Henry would be restored to health and the pain of his inability to acknowledge their heir. At Christmas, however, Henry at last came to his senses. He asked his son’s name, thanked God for his recovery and was able to resume his religious devotions. But even after such a long rest his political sense had become no more acute. Somerset was soon released from the Tower and restored to his post as constable and York’s protectorate was at an end. The Duke, accompanied by Warwick and the Earl of Salisbury, left London soon afterwards without taking formal leave of the King, a subtle but telling gesture.
By mid-May, Somerset realised that York had gone north to raise an army. On 21 May the court set off to confront the rebels at St Albans, sending Marguerite and her ladies to Greenwich for safety. After some discussion, Henry, in an atypical but predictably unintelligent show of decisiveness, determined that the royalist troops should set up their battle base in the centre of the town. At first, it seemed that their barricades would hold off the Yorkists, but Warwick had a party of men creep through the gardens and demolish a group of houses, through which they broke into the marketplace. Henry’s immediate entourage now came under attack. The King’s only contribution to the action was to sit in his armour in his pavilion, praying, but even then he managed to get an arrow wound in the neck and had to run away and hide in a cottage with Somerset. York had Henry removed to more suitable quarters, but for Somerset there was no hope. Cornered in the Castle Inn, Somerset resolved to go down fighting, and rushed on his attackers, taking four of them with him. With his enemy destroyed, York went through the motions of asking Henry’s pardon, which the King had no choice but to grant.
It would be unwise to see St Albans as dividing ‘Yorkists’ and ‘Lancastrians’ into two neatly defined opposing factions, gearing up for the Wars of the Roses. The battle had been motivated by York’s passion to be rid of Somerset, but it was also an opportunity for the Nevilles to settle private grievances; the only other two important magnates killed that day were Neville enemies. With Henry still unfit even to go through the motions of government, York found it easy to have himself declared protector once more, but his troubles had not died with Somerset. The garrison of Calais had mutinied and there were ongoing disturbances in the west country. York’s challenge was to patch up a consensus in a situation where Henry’s failure as a king had permitted essentially local disputes to fatally undermine national unity.
Marguerite, it must be said, was no politician. She saw things in black and white. She had been outraged when, as part of York’s Act of Resumption in his first Parliament, her expenditure was ordered to be reduced to 10,000 marks and she was deprived of the power to bequeath duchy of Lancaster revenues. If she had ever had any faith in her husband, it was gone. She now had to protect him, and their child, from the threat York represented, and she saw herself as the successor to Somerset. In 1456 Henry was sufficiently sensible to attend Parliament and York was officially relieved of his commission as protector, but York and the Neville party managed to keep the King away from any serious business, and Marguerite was keen to get him out of London in order to influence him for his own good.
Accordingly, she left for Coventry Castle with Prince Edward, moving north towards Chester. Henry joined her in August at Kenilworth, and soon Marguerite had persuaded him to replace York’s men with supporters of her own in the offices of treasurer and chancellor. Marguerite’s private chancellor, Laurence Booth, became keeper of the Privy Seal and was then promoted to the see of Durham. As she began to gain some grip in government, Marguerite also concentrated on augmenting her power base in two areas: the duchy of Lancaster lands in the Midlands, where she held the honours of Tutbury and Leicester, and Prince Edward’s earldom of Chester and principality of Wales. She took Edward on a tour of Cheshire and the Midlands, showing him to the people and reminding them that she was the mother of their future King. Little Edward now had his own household, and Marguerite was beginning to draw around her those men she believed would faithfully support his succession when the time came. These included the new Duke of Somerset and his brother, the Percy Earl of Northumberland and Lord Clifford, whose fathers had died at St Albans, lords Grey and Wiltshire, the bishop of Winchester and the Duke of Buckingham, whose son, Henry Stafford, was married to Margaret Beaufort, herself the strongest claimant to the throne after Prince Edward through her descent from John of Gaunt. The Beaufort connection was heightened by the fact that Margaret was the widow of Edmund Tudor, Catherine de Valois’s son, whose brother Jasper, the Earl of Pembroke, was to be a staunch champion of the Lancastrian cause, acting as the King’s lieutenant in central and southern Wales and receiving the constableship of Carmarthen and Aberystwyth in 1457.
In March 1458, Henry believed he had inaugurated a reconciliation ceremony whose bombastic symbolism might make even a present-day political spin-doctor cringe. The ‘Loveday’ featured Marguerite progressing hand in hand with the Duke of York to St Paul’s, accompanied by the main protagonists on both sides. The Queen’s clumsy emphasis on York–Lancaster unity now brought into focus what everyone until this point had found it convenient to ignore: that there in fact existed two opposing camps. ‘It is perhaps at this point, ironically at the most overt moment of conciliation,’ remarks Christine Carpenter, ‘that the Wars of the Roses can be said to have begun.’10
Still, it seemed that Marguerite was regaining control of the situation and at this juncture it is interesting to ask why she seemed so determined to alienate the Earl of Warwick. Warwick had held the captaincy of England’s most important remaining Continental garrison since 1455, though wrangling over wages arrears had meant he had been unable to enter the city for a year. Now, Marguerite pushed the exchequer to starve him of the funds he needed, and as his resources dwindled Warwick resorted to piracy to pay his men. The Queen returned to London in the autumn and attempted to have Warwick deposed and indicted on the charge of attacking the Hanseatic Bay fleet, a crime of which he was entirely guilty but which nevertheless her own policies had provoked. Warwick retreated to Calais after fighting his way to his barge on the Thames. However, Marguerite could still have recognised the possibility of negotiation with the powerful Neville family who, up to November 1458, were not overtly partisan. It was not until the Earl of Salisbury, Warwick’s father, held a family meeting at their seat at Middleham to declare his intention of taking ‘full party with the noble prince the Duke of York’ that the Nevilles were definitively alienated. Why did Marguerite not have the sense to make an ally of Warwick? As events were later to prove, she held a tremendous lure to Warwick’s ambition in the person of Prince Edward. Was it pride or obstinacy that pushed her to force those magnates who remained neutral to take sides?
It was apparent that England was headed for war. Marguerite was raising troops in Cheshire and the Wirral and in May 1459 3,000 bows were ordered for the royal armoury. Marguerite and Henry were at Coventry, from where they summoned the men of the shires to muster at Leicester. A council was announced for June, but York, Salisbury, Warwick and their supporters were excluded. In response, the Yorkists decided to hold their own council at Ludlow, with Warwick bringing a contingent from Calais. Warwick arrived safely, and from Ludlow York published another of his open letters, declaring his loyalty and asking Henry’s pardon, but insisting that he had been driven to extremity for the good of the realm. Warwick’s father, however, was intercepted by Marguerite’s supporters, and gave the lie to the Ludlow protestations. Very little is known about the encounter between Salisbury and a group of Cheshire men led by Lord Audley at Blore’s Heath that September, but Salisbury had the better of it and Audley was killed. A local tradition claims that Marguerite herself watched the battle from the nearby church tower of Mucclestone, then escaped by reversing her horse’s shoes to lay a false trail. There is no reliability to this story, but it is perhaps the first of the legends that grew up around Marguerite as a warrior queen. Salisbury pushed on to Ludlow, but on 12 October the Yorkist leaders had to face the fact that they were hopelessly outnumbered. Henry himself was there at the head of his troops, and such was the power of majesty that the Calais division, the Yorkists’ crack fighting corps, promptly changed sides. There was little point in a confrontation. York fled to Ireland, his eldest son, Edward, Earl of March, galloped off into the night with his Neville cousins, and Warwick and Salisbury, assisted by a Devon man named John Dinham, got away safely to Calais. There could now be no pretence that either side sought a peaceful resolution to England’s problems. This would be a fight to the death.
Ludlow taught Marguerite the essential lesson that power lay with whoever controlled the person of the king, as the innate respect for the anointed monarch inspired a powerful reluctance to take up arms against him. Her enemies scattered, the Queen triumphantly summoned a council at Coventry which issued attainders depriving Yorkist supporters of their lands and bestowing them on Marguerite’s men. But Calais was still controlled by Warwick, despite Somerset having been appointed captain in his place. Somerset took up quarters at the port of Guines, from where he launched repeated but unsuccessful attacks against the garrison. The royalists tried to come to his aid by preparing a fleet at Sandwich, but suffered a huge setback when Lord Rivers, the commander, his wife, the Duchess of Bedford, and their son, Anthony Woodville, were taken by a raiding party sent by Warwick and all the ships commandeered. In June 1460 the Yorkists succeeded in taking the port itself, and Marguerite had to accept that an invasion would follow.
It was shockingly swift. By 26 June, Warwick’s forces were at Canterbury and two days later they marched towards London. Marguerite and Prince Edward remained at Coventry while the King and his supporters made for the capital. They paused at Northampton and set up camp while the Yorkist forces, now sure of Henry’s whereabouts, swung north after only two days in the city. The battle that followed lasted only half an hour. Buckingham was killed in the King’s tent and Henry himself was taken prisoner by Warwick. Marguerite and Edward were attacked as they fled from Coventry, but with the help of Owen Tudor they managed to reach the safety of Harlech Castle in Wales.
York arrived in London in September, and though Warwick had protested his loyalty to the imprisoned Henry over the summer, it was obvious that the Duke was intent upon the crown. Notably, he displayed the arms of Clarence for the first time as he entered the city. York was descended from Edward III through both his father and his mother, who was a great-granddaughter of Lionel, Duke of Clarence, Edward’s third son. He was clearly eager to exercise the female, as well as the male claim to his right to rule, and to emphasise at this crucial moment that in this respect his position was actually stronger than Henry’s own, since Salic law, which permitted succession only through the male line, did not apply in England as it did in France. York entered the palace of Westminster and ‘went straight through to the Great Hall until he came to the chamber where the King . . . was accustomed to hold his Parliament. There he strode up to the throne and put his hand on its cushion just as though he were a man about to take possession of what was rightfully his.’11 He did not receive the rapturous reception he clearly anticipated; indeed, his audacity was greeted with offended silence, but in the Act of Accord of 24 October 1460, he had his way. Parliament decided that Henry would keep the throne for life, but that it would then devolve to York and his heirs. Prince Edward was disinherited, and it would be York’s son, Edward, Earl of March, who would wear the crown in the next generation.
Marguerite’s cause was now precisely defined. Until this point, she had obviously been acting in Prince Edward’s interests, but with this act her defence of his rights became official. Even operating under duress, it was despicably pathetic that Henry should have concurred with the annulment of his own son’s rights, and unsurprising that Marguerite refused to answer her weak husband’s summons to London. Instead she managed to get a ship for Scotland, where she negotiated with King James II for reinforcements and funds. On her own authority, she offered to trade the stronghold of Berwick for Scottish aid. Meanwhile, Somerset was active in the south-west, and the Percy lands in the north were still loyal. By December, the Lancastrian forces were gathered at Pontefract under the command of Somerset and Northumberland, while the Yorkists were holed up at York’s castle of Sandal near Wakefield.
The battle of Wakefield was a huge victory for the Lancastrians but a disaster for Marguerite’s reputation. One of her influential biographers has it that she led her troops in person (having boned up on her Livy – apparently her tactics mirrored those of Hannibal at Cannae), and had the head of the Duke of York brought to her, whereupon she slapped the dead face, stuck a paper crown on its head and spiked it on the gates of York. Shakespeare’s version, in King Henry VI Part III, has Marguerite stabbing York with her own hands. York did die on the battlefield, the Earl of Salisbury was executed at Pontefract and the heads of the losers were displayed on the walls of York, but Marguerite herself took no part in the Wakefield executions, though she may well have rejoiced at them. As in the case of Eleanor of Aquitaine, Marguerite’s exceptional qualities not only counted against her posthumously but also with her contemporaries. What people were prepared to say and believe of her gives an insight into how she was perceived, and the aftermath of Wakefield portrayed her as terrifying.
Marguerite led her troops south, but lack of discipline and the perennial problem of supplies soon had the troops stripping the countryside. The Scottish soldiers had a fearsome reputation, and panic began to spread through the Midland counties. The London Chronicle gives a picture of what was rapidly being seen less as a royal campaign than as a barbarian invasion from the north.
The northmen, being sensible that the only impediment was now withdrawn . . . swept onwards like a whirlwind from the north, and in the impulse of their fury attempted to overrun the whole of England. At this period too, fancying that everything tended to ensure them freedom from molestation, paupers and beggars flocked forth from those quarters in infinite numbers, just like so many mice rushing forward from their holes, and universally devoted themselves to spoil and rapine without regard for place or person . . . Thus did they proceed with impunity, spreading in vast multitudes over a space of thirty miles in breadth . . . covering the whole surface of the earth just like so many locusts.12
Yorkist propaganda seized on Marguerite’s inability to control her advancing army, to the point where one historian suggests it was their ‘excesses’ that were decisive in the outcome of the conflict. As the Lancastrians made their lawless way down the country, Edward, Earl of March, now the Yorkist leader and heir apparent, encountered Jasper Tudor and his troops en route to Hereford. The battle of Mortimer’s Cross was the first of an impressive series of victories for the young Earl, and also provided the badge he was to adopt as the symbol of his house, the golden sun of York, inspired by what appeared to be three suns in the sky as the armies engaged. Owen Tudor was among the Lancastrian prisoners who were executed at Hereford after the battle. He was reported to have said, ‘That head shall lie on the stock that was wont to lie on Queen Catherine’s lap,’ before the executioner gave the stroke.
The next confrontation came on 17 February 1461 at St Albans, where Warwick was faced with another Duke of Somerset. For all his subsequent reputation as a kingmaker, Warwick lost the battle, misplacing the captured King Henry in the process. Marguerite and Prince Edward were sheltering in the abbey, and Henry managed to make his way to join them, apparently quite unmolested. Two days later the Lancastrians were prepared to march for the gates of London. The city authorities were terrified that the soldiers would sack the town, and the lord mayor sent a deputation of aristocratic ladies to negotiate the terms of entry. ‘The Duchess of Bedford . . . went to St Albans to the King, Queen and Prince, for to entreat for grace for the city,’ recorded The London Chronicle. ‘And the King and his council granted that four knights with four hundred men should go to the City and see the disposition of it, and make an appointment with the Mayor and the Aldermen.’ Unusually, this agreement was essentially negotiated between women, so it is disappointing that it proved such a strategic disaster. Marguerite and the Duchess of Bedford were very much on the same side (the Duchess and her husband, Lord Rivers, had, after all, been kidnapped by Warwick during preparations for the attack on Calais, and her son-in-law, John Grey, had just lost his life at St Albans), yet Lady Bedford and her companion Lady Buckingham were so convincing in conveying the fears of the Londoners that Marguerite, fearful of losing their goodwill, lost her nerve instead. She ordered her troops to retreat to Dunstable as a gesture of good faith and in doing so she may well have set the crown on Edward of March’s head. The panic inspired by the advance of the northmen had done its work and the mood of the citizens was staunchly pro-Yorkist, but Marguerite had the King and she had an army, as well as a group of loyal nobles within the city. The Duchess of Bedford has been praised for ‘saving’ London, but as far as her own side was concerned, it was an own goal.
In contrast with Marguerite, Edward of March proved himself quick and resolute at this moment of crisis. He joined forces with Warwick in the Cotswolds and together they entered London on 26 February. The people had had enough of Henry’s ditherings and they were exhausted by terror. Prince Edward was a child of seven, but Edward of March was a man, and a big, handsome, fighting man at that. An Italian correspondent reported that there was a ‘great multitude who say they want to be with him to conquer or die’.On 4 March, the nineteen-year-old Earl was proclaimed as King Edward IV.
The Lancastrian cause was not entirely lost at this juncture. If Marguerite were able to hold out, there was a good chance that Edward, perceived by many as a usurper, would waste his forces and his popularity pursuing her. Edward knew that he had to attack, and do so decisively. In mid-March he set off towards Yorkshire and at the end of the month the two sides met once more at Towton. Chronicle figures are notoriously misleading when it comes to the size of medieval armies, but in this case, even a conservative estimation of the numbers involved gives 50,000 men apiece to both Yorkists and Lancastrians. Towton was perhaps the bloodiest battle of a bloody century, though no eyewitness description has survived. Perhaps the greatest asset the Yorkists had was Edward himself, who fought on foot after his cavalry was routed by Somerset and Lord Rivers. Prepared to go to the death beside his standard, he cut a magnificent figure in the hand-to-hand combat at the core of the battle, all the more so for the conspicuous absence of his opposite number. It was claimed that 28,000 men fell at Towton, and even if this figure is exaggerated, it was felt as a calamity, ‘a last, appalling commentary on the misrule of Henry VI’.13
Edward IV was crowned at Westminster on 28 June, three months after Towton. Marguerite, Henry and Prince Edward were now in Scotland, from where, in April, Marguerite had made good her promise of giving up Berwick, which did nothing for her popularity even among Englishmen who were sympathetic. In fact, one of Marguerite’s greatest disadvantages had been her inability to understand the consensual structure of English society, particularly the vital role of the gentry in the shires whose support was essential to the crown in times of need. It was these lesser men, rather than great magnates like Warwick or Somerset, who were embittered by the local unruliness and financial instability that had threatened them throughout the 1450s, and Marguerite had alienated them from the beginning by her aggressively partisan approach. The recent wars had not been expressly fought to get rid of Henry, but many people were glad to see the back of Marguerite. She had also gained a bloodthirsty reputation, however undeservedly, and her mishandling of her northern troops had terrified many potential loyalists into the Yorkist camp.
However, Marguerite is to some extent a victim of hindsight. Just as Suffolk had been made the scapegoat for the disastrous losses of the 1440s, so Marguerite was blamed for her husband’s shortcomings. If Henry were to be a saintly figure, pious, humble and unworldly, then it was necessary for someone to take the responsibility for the whole mess of his reign, and many writers chose the traditional option of chercher la femme. Marguerite may not have been possessed of brilliant understanding but she was ‘a great and intensely active woman, for she spares no pains to pursue her business towards an end and conclusion favourable to her power’.14 Moreover, unlike many of her contemporaries, such as her former chancellor Laurence Booth, who now became confessor to the new King, she had remained staunchly loyal to the cause of her husband and son. She had been dealt a dud hand with Henry, and perhaps, like Suffolk, should be ‘given credit for taking on an impossible job’.15 Undaunted, she continued to battle for her rights for the next decade.