Identity had been at the heart of Margaret’s difficulties in the long years of struggle for her husband’s throne. Henry’s inadequacies had left the mantle of kingship hanging limp and empty, and although Margaret had supplied the will and purpose to animate his cause, she could not, as a woman and a wife, simply inhabit the role he had left so damagingly vacant.
Now Margaret had no choice but to watch as those same questions of identity underpinned the creation of a new regime that promised to destroy everything she had ever worked for. The mantle of kingship rested squarely on the broad shoulders of Edward of York. He was forceful, decisive, energetic, magnetic; he promised leadership of a kind England had not experienced since the death of Henry’s father forty years earlier. ‘Words fail me to relate how well the commons love and adore him, as if he were their god,’ reported an Italian resident in London a fortnight after Edward’s victory at Towton. ‘Thus far, he appears to be a just prince who intends to amend and organise matters otherwise than has been done hitherto …’ And when this new king was anointed in Westminster Abbey on 28 June – a golden boy in a golden crown – it seemed that God was merely confirming what was already evident in his talents, his actions and the fact of his victory.
It was not, of course, quite that simple. Although the south of England was agog with expectation and relief at Edward’s accession, his new-found authority was much more precarious in the north and west, in the parts of Wales and northern England that Margaret had counted her heartlands. And, crucially, his enemies – Margaret, Henry and their son, the king’s half-brother Jasper Tudor, and the dukes of Somerset and Exeter who had fled for their lives from the slaughter at Towton – were still at large, despite strenuous efforts to convince observers at home and abroad that they were safely in custody. ‘I do not believe that, since vain flowers always grow in good news,’ Prospero di Camulio, the Milanese ambassador at the French court, wrote with some asperity to his duke, Francesco Sforza; ‘… if the king and queen of England with the other fugitives are not taken,’ he added, circumspectly slipping into cipher, ‘it seems certain that in time fresh disturbances will arise.’
Fresh disturbances were certainly Margaret’s intention. Unhappy though the comparison might be in the eyes of her adopted countrymen, had not her uncle Charles VII ejected the English from his kingdom of France even after her husband had been crowned in Paris? The accession of a Yorkist king was an illegitimate and therefore temporary interruption to her husband’s rights and her son’s future inheritance, which she would reclaim with the help of her uncle of France and that of his steadfast allies, her present hosts in Edinburgh.
The price, however, was high. The Scots and the French were fierce guardians of their own interests, not partisans of Margaret’s cause. The cost of Scots support was the immediate surrender of the contested border town of Berwick and the promise of Carlisle, if it could be captured. Her hopes for support from her uncle of France were dashed when news reached Scotland of Charles’s death on 22 July – the very day on which she had written to ask for his help – and the succession of his son, Louis XI, a strategist so subtle he was dubbed ‘the spider king’, who had already as dauphin offered assistance to the Yorkists’ cause. Nevertheless, a visit by Margaret to the French court in the spring and summer of 1462 produced a treaty and a loan, albeit on the alarming (and prudently hidden) condition that Calais should be put up as security.
Margaret was working hard and hoping for much, but the longer this intricate diplomatic dance continued, the more uncertain became the ground beneath her feet. The passage of time served only to reinforce Edward’s stature as king, and to chip away at what remained of the fragmented authority to which she herself could lay claim. At the first parliament of the new reign, held at Westminster in November 1461, the queen and prince (‘Edward her son’, as the parliamentary proceedings pointedly called him) were attainted of treason on the grounds of offences ‘committed against her faith and allegiance to our sovereign and liege lord King Edward’. Such a description of her actions against a man whose sovereignty she had never acknowledged and would never recognise might well have raised a hollow laugh from Margaret; but this formal denunciation served to give public sanction to what was now an unstoppable flood of venomous innuendo and propaganda.
All the old rumours about the queen’s aberrant behaviour had sprung into newly elaborate life in the nerve-wracking weeks before Towton. Gossip in Brussels had it that Margaret had persuaded Henry to abdicate in favour of their son, Prospero di Camulio reported, and that the queen had then poisoned her husband (‘at least he has known how to die, if he did not know what to do else’) in order to marry the duke of Somerset. Di Camulio was not convinced by this ornately melodramatic tale, or by Henry’s alleged remark that the prince ‘must be the son of the Holy Spirit’ – an observation that was, in any case, altogether too sharp to be plausibly the king’s – but he thought them worth recounting nonetheless.
Meanwhile, propagandists for the new regime in England were offering a more direct political commentary on Margaret’s activities. ‘It is right a great abusion’, one poem in circulation in 1462 argued,
A woman of a land to be regent –
Queen Margaret I mean, that ever hath meant
To govern all England with might and power
And to destroy the right line was her intent …
She and her wicked affinity certain
Intend utterly to destroy this region;
For with them is but death and destruction,
Robbery and vengeance with all rigour.
Long-standing insinuations about the queen’s conduct could now be spoken openly. Margaret’s self-assertion was illegitimate and reprehensible because she was female, and her intentions toward her adopted country were hostile and destructive. This foreign-born queen was damned twice over, by her birth and by her sex; and her plight now, as a refugee dragging her husband and son between the courts of England’s old enemies, dependent on their charity and seeking their aid, only served to emphasise those two dangerous failings.
Nor was the new Yorkist regime slow to underline the point. In March 1462 King Edward wrote to the aldermen of London and other sympathisers with deep purses to ask for their help in resisting a fearsome French invasion by which ‘the people, the name, the tongue and the blood English’ would be wiped out – a scheme to which his ‘adversary Henry’ had been moved ‘by the malicious and subtle suggestion and enticing of the said malicious woman Margaret, his wife’. And rumour fed thirstily on rumour until it was reported that Margaret and Henry would return at the head of an army made up, hydra-like, of contingents from Brittany, Burgundy, Scotland and Spain, with fresh waves of hundreds of thousands more troops sent by the kings of France, Aragon, Denmark, Sicily, Navarre and Portugal waiting to overwhelm England’s shores.
Despite all the wild speculation and Margaret’s unrelenting diplomatic efforts, her invasion fleet, when it finally landed on the Northumbrian coast in October 1462, numbered only forty-two ships carrying scarcely more than eight hundred men, the meagre reward of her agreement that summer with Louis XI. Northumberland was friendly country, a stronghold of Percy influence where the new king’s authority was tenuous in the extreme, and the great fortresses of Bamburgh, Dunstanburgh and Alnwick quickly opened their gates to the queen’s soldiers. But news came that Edward was marching north at the head of a massive army, and Margaret, knowing that her resources were desperately limited, left garrisons to hold the castles as best they could against Yorkist siege and took ship for a storm-battered retreat to Scotland. A further advance from Berwick in the summer of 1463 – Margaret, Henry and their son at the head of troops provided by the queen mother of Scotland – was also quickly rebuffed by forceful Yorkist resistance.
It was devastatingly clear now that, however great the ostensible insecurities of King Edward’s regime and however certain Margaret was of the justice of her cause, England was not waiting breathlessly for the chance to rise up in support of Henry VI. His shortcomings, after all, were the same as they had ever been, and the sight of his queen in the company of French or Scottish soldiers was hardly likely to convince the apprehensive inhabitants of northern England that their best interests lay in his restoration. By the autumn of 1463 it was also unhappily apparent that Margaret was not orchestrating the diplomacy in which she was so intensely engaged. Instead – and unsurprisingly, given how few moves she had left to make – she found herself a pawn in others’ schemes. She had sailed again to France that summer, after the damp squib of the Scottish campaign, in a determined attempt to shore up the support she had been promised by the slippery Louis XI, but during the autumn and winter her understandings with both France and Scotland collapsed as both kingdoms found themselves persuaded of the superior benefits of dealing with Yorkist England.
Pawn or no, Margaret would never give in. She established herself at her father’s castle of Koeur near St Mihiel-en-Bar, 150 miles east of Paris, with her ten-year-old son as always at her side, at the head of a small and impoverished court of loyalists. There they continued their efforts, even submerged as they were in the powerful currents of European politics, and despite the desperate paucity of their resources, both financial and diplomatic; one ill-fated attempt to solicit help from Portugal was hampered by the fact that no one among the little band at Koeur could quite remember the name of the Portuguese king. ‘Yet the queen sustains us in meat and drink,’ Margaret’s chancellor John Fortescue reported in December 1464 – and in purpose, too, he might have added. ‘Her highness may do no more to us than she does.’
But by then, it seemed, they were lost in political darkness. Back in 1463, Margaret had left Henry in the safekeeping of the Scots, but their treaty with Edward at the end of that year had left her husband a fugitive, a pitiful, lost figure moving from refuge to refuge in northern England. There were grounds for hope that sympathy for his cause might run deep enough in the northern counties to keep him safe, and by the spring of 1464 he was still at liberty. Then, however, such loyalist forces as remained under the command of the duke of Somerset – who had himself despaired of their chances so much that he had flirted with defection to King Edward’s court in 1463 – sought to ambush the earl of Warwick’s brother John Neville, Lord Montagu, at Hedgeley Moor a few miles from Alnwick in Northumberland. But Somerset’s men were caught in their own trap, and put to flight after damaging losses; and at Hexham on 14 May Montagu inflicted the final blow. The duke lost his head the day after the battle, and with this forceful, mercurial man – who was still only twenty-eight, and had spent his entire adult life fighting to defend Henry’s crown – military resistance on English soil was finally spent.
Montagu found Henry’s jewelled and gold-embroidered hat at nearby Bywell Castle, but of the king himself there was no sign. For twelve more months Henry eked out a wretched existence, constantly moving from place to place with two or three devoted attendants. But at last in July 1465 he was captured near a ford across the river Ribble in Lancashire, and taken under guard to London with his feet tied to the stirrups of his horse. He was treated gently, and his life was in no danger, since there was no advantage to Edward in Henry’s death while his wife and son remained at liberty. Much better, the king knew, for his rival for the throne to be an imprisoned fool than a boy growing to manhood in France in the care of his indefatigable mother. And, with Henry under lock and key in the Tower and Margaret and their son in impoverished exile, there seemed little need for serious concern about a revival in the fortunes of this Lancastrian dynasty. ‘No man living can see far ahead at present in the affairs of England,’ Prospero di Camulio had written in 1461; but four years later it appeared that some predictions, at least, could be made with confidence.
That, however, was to reckon without the Yorkist regime itself, and the capacity for self-destruction it was already beginning to exhibit. Forged in adversity, the alliance between the young king and his Neville cousins was close and intense, but Edward’s relationship with his oldest cousin Warwick was beginning to show signs of profound strain. Warwick’s pivotal role in the Yorkist campaigns that led to Edward’s accession had been rewarded with wide-ranging powers: as well as captain of Calais, he was now great chamberlain and admiral of England, warden of the Cinque Ports (the key harbours for trade and defence on the south-eastern coast) and – together with his brother Montagu – warden of the borderlands with Scotland in the north. The king had leaned heavily on Warwick in the establishment and defence of his new regime, but Warwick had arrogance and ambition exceeding even his undoubted ability and spectacular wealth, and it was becomingly ominously apparent that he saw himself as the power behind the Yorkist throne by right rather than royal command.
It was a view of his importance that was shared by many observers. ‘They say that every day favours the earl of Warwick, who seems to me to be everything in this kingdom,’ the duke of Milan was told in 1461. Three years later, a similar assessment, more archly expressed, was despatched to Louis XI: in England, wrote the governor of Abbeville, ‘they have but two rulers – Monsieur de Warwick, and another, whose name I have forgotten’. But Edward himself could not afford to accommodate his cousin’s pretensions if he were ever to exercise the untrammelled authority of a legitimate king.
The first indication of a rift between the two men had come in the spring of 1464, when Edward was riding north to meet ambassadors from Scotland in the wake of the defeat of the duke of Somerset at Hedgeley Moor. On his way, he stopped for a night at Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire and, early the next morning, went out alone for several hours. On his return, he told his servants that he had been hunting, and retired to bed again to sleep. It was not until four months later that Edward revealed the extraordinary truth: on that May morning he had married in secret, without either consulting or informing his lords and advisers.
Still more astonishing was the identity of his bride. The twenty-two-year-old king had taken as his wife Elizabeth Woodville, a widow five years his senior and already the mother of two young sons, whose first husband, a knight named Sir John Grey, had been killed fighting in Margaret’s army against the earl of Warwick at St Albans in 1461. It seems likely that this match – not so much politically inappropriate as politically inconceivable – was an impetuous choice precipitated by personal, not political, impulses. Elizabeth, it was rapidly noted, had a steely intelligence to match her exquisite beauty, and had allegedly refused the king’s advances unless he married her. But when Edward somewhat sheepishly broke the news of his wedding to his council four months later, the announcement had the supplementary effect of manifesting the king’s independence from his cousin of Warwick, who was left embarrassingly marooned in the midst of negotiating a match for Edward with the French king’s sister-in-law.
Watching hawkishly from her impecunious little court at Koeur, Margaret was quick to see the significance of this enjoyable humiliation for a long-loathed adversary. ‘The queen, wife of King Henry, has written to the king here that she is advised that King Edward and the earl of Warwick have come to very great division and war together,’ the Milanese ambassador reported from France in February 1465. ‘She begs the king here to be pleased to give her help so that she may be able to recover her kingdom, or at least allow her to receive assistance from the lords of this kingdom who are willing to afford this …’ (‘Look how proudly she writes,’ King Louis observed, with a mixture of amusement and admiration.)
She was right that the disintegrating relationship between Edward and Warwick was a disaster waiting to happen for the Yorkist regime, but the opportunity it afforded her was more complex, more costly and much slower to materialise than she had hoped in the spring of 1465. Warwick would not lightly loosen his grip on power, and Edward had no wish to alienate his cousin completely. The earl therefore put a brave and graceful face on a marriage he had no choice but to accept as a fait accompli, standing godfather in February 1466 to the king’s first child, a daughter named Elizabeth after her mother, and presiding at the magnificent feast held to celebrate the emergence from her confinement of the lovely and unsuitable new queen.
By the summer of 1467, however, Edward’s increasingly obdurate refusal to follow Warwick’s direction in the conduct of his kingdom’s diplomacy was played out on an unforgivingly public stage. Warwick, who had been pressing hard for an alliance with France, left England for Rouen in May to take the lead in negotiations with Louis XI. Edward, meanwhile, was inclining increasingly explicitly towards a treaty with France’s bitter enemy Philippe of Burgundy, ruler of not only the great duchy of Burgundy on France’s eastern border but also the rich territories of Flanders and the Netherlands. And while Warwick was away, Edward remained in London to entertain Duke Philippe’s illegitimate son at a sumptuous tournament. When Warwick returned home at the end of June with a deputation of French ambassadors swelling his train, it was to find that Edward was already committed to a Burgundian alliance, and that his own brother George Neville, the archbishop of York, had been summarily dismissed as England’s chancellor. Warwick’s pointed and public response was to leave court, riding at the head of his entourage for his estates in the north.
For Margaret, this breach between her two chief enemies represented a chink in the Yorkist armour through which she might hope to strike a fatal blow. That her dreams were not entirely misconceived was evident in the French king’s willingness for the first time in years to lend support to an attempted invasion. In June 1468 a small Lancastrian force made landfall in north Wales under the command of Jasper Tudor, who was not only a tireless supporter of his half-brother’s cause but had become, in exile, a trusted servant of Louis himself. Only a few weeks passed before Tudor’s efforts were repelled and Margaret’s hopes dashed; but already, in the alienation between Warwick and Edward and the increasingly unsettled state of Yorkist England, Louis’s incisive intelligence had seen the possibility of a different – and an entirely extraordinary – way forward.
More than a year earlier, in February 1467, Louis had been involved in a sharp exchange at dinner with Margaret’s brother Jean, who held the title of duke of Calabria as heir to their father, Duke René. The French king had been generous in his commendation of the earl of Warwick as a friend to France, which had provoked Duke Jean to vituperative anger, the Milanese ambassador reported:
… he was a traitor; he would not suffer any good to be said of him; he only studied to deceive; he was the enemy and the cause of the fall of King Henry and his sister the queen of England. His Majesty would do better to help his sister to recover her kingdom than to favour the earl of Warwick; and many other inflated and opprobrious words …
Louis, however, persisted in his praise of Warwick, and the conversation became more heated: ‘the duke said that, as he was so fond of him, he ought to try and restore his sister in that kingdom, when he would make sure of it as much as he was sure at present and even more so’.
These were barbed words spoken on impulse, rendered indistinct in the retelling by the repeated, undifferentiated pronouns, but the apparent suggestion that French favour to the earl of Warwick and support for the restoration of King Henry and Queen Margaret might not, in spite of everything, be mutually incompatible was a seed that began to germinate. Warwick, after all, had the men and money within England to launch a coup from the very heart of the Yorkist establishment, thereby obviating the need for any French commitment to wholesale military intervention across the Channel; and Henry – as represented by Margaret and her son – had the claim to royal authority that would allow the overthrow of Edward and, with him, the destruction of England’s threatening alliance with Burgundy. Three months later, this dinner-table banter had made its way onto the diplomatic agenda, within French counsels at least. When another report was despatched across the Alps to Milan on 19 May, the news from the French court centred on the impending arrival of Warwick’s embassy at Rouen and the simultaneous rumours of Edward’s intention to agree a treaty with Burgundy. ‘If this takes place’, the Milanese informants observed, ‘they have talked of treating with the earl of Warwick to restore King Henry in England, and the ambassador of the old queen of England is already here.’
What is certain, however, is that – eager though Warwick and Margaret both were to cultivate Louis’s support – neither was yet prepared to countenance this bizarre proposal. Yes, Warwick was estranged from his king, and disposed, it seemed increasingly likely, to do something about his growing disaffection. But his plans did not involve the woman responsible for the deaths of his father and brother, whom for fifteen years he had regarded as a mortal enemy. And for Margaret the feeling was entirely mutual.
When Warwick finally made his move, therefore, it was on his own terms, while Margaret and her little band of loyalists at Koeur could do no more than follow the bulletins that reached them via sympathetic eyes and ears in England and at the French king’s court. The earl had laid his plans well, convincing Edward that, after a winter spent brooding in his northern strongholds, he was willing to accept a role in royal government that was one of influence rather than control, at the king’s right hand rather than pulling his strings. So when Edward made his leisurely way north from London in June 1469, he believed he was faced with a little local difficulty, an eruption of discontent in Yorkshire over taxes he had demanded to pay for an invasion of France which had failed to materialise once the money lay safely in the royal coffers. He had reached the midlands when he heard the chilling news that he faced not a peasant rabble but the might of the earl of Warwick’s army.
The shockwaves of this Yorkist rising against the Yorkist king rippled across Europe. It seemed scarcely credible that the two great architects of King Henry’s fall might now face each other across the field of battle. And shock, it appeared, might seal King Edward’s fate, since his hurried, urgent attempt to muster troops in his own defence was outmanoeuvred by the carefully planned deployment of Warwick’s forces. On 29 July the king set out to meet reinforcements who had already, though he did not know it, been defeated. He was captured on the road and taken under armed guard, icy but impotent in his rage, first to his cousin’s castle at Warwick, and then north to the Neville fortress at Middleham.
The initial stage of Warwick’s plan – to take control of government by seizing control of the king – had worked, so far as it went. What to do next, however, was less straightforward. Efforts to rule in the name of Henry VI, a king manifestly incompetent to govern for himself, had proved self-defeating and unsustainable, as Warwick well knew. Ruling in the name of King Edward, who was all too obviously neither incapable of making his own decisions nor content to be kept under lock and key, turned out to be impossible. As the country erupted into disorder – which Warwick proved unable to contain on the authority of a king whom the earl himself was holding captive – his options appeared unnervingly limited.
One of his less likely supporters probably had a more creative solution in mind. Extraordinarily, Edward’s younger brother George, duke of Clarence, had joined Warwick in rebellion against the king, apparently in pique at Edward’s refusal to allow him to marry Isabel, the elder of Warwick’s two daughters, who would one day inherit all their father’s vast territorial riches. On 11 July, in an act of open defiance, Clarence had taken Isabel as his wife at his new father-in-law’s stronghold of Calais, but this was only the first of the benefits he hoped to receive from the new dispensation in English politics. The twenty-year-old duke was King Edward’s next male heir, Queen Elizabeth having presented her husband with three daughters in the five years of their marriage so far, and it seems likely that Clarence – who was vain, vaultingly ambitious and profoundly immature – hoped that Warwick’s coup would sweep him to the throne in his brother’s place.
The duke’s shallow narcissism, however, was reason enough – especially in the absence of any arguable case for his right to the crown – to leave Clarence himself as his scheme’s only supporter. And when at the end of August Lancastrian sympathisers in the far north seized this unanticipated chance to raise the standard of revolt in King Henry’s name, Warwick found that he had no choice but to release the other imprisoned king of England, since no one would answer a call for troops on his own questionable authority while Edward remained in custody. At that point, with Edward free and the rebels’ heads safely on spikes at York, Warwick discovered that, having taken the royal genie out of the bottle, he could not easily put it back.
By mid-October the king had made a triumphal entry into London, to be greeted by the aldermen and guilds of the city decked out in their best scarlet and blue. Observers on the continent had no idea what to think; ‘… things there are in the air without it being possible to form a sound judgement as to what the end will be’, the Milanese ambassador reported from Orléans. ‘Indeed, His Majesty is puzzled as well as everyone else.’ But Louis XI was no more or less confused than Edward’s subjects in London. ‘I know not what to suppose therein,’ wrote Sir John Paston from his lodgings in the capital. ‘The king himself has good language of the lords of Clarence, of Warwick … saying they are his best friends. But his household men have other language, so what shall hastily fall I cannot say.’
For five months the cousins circled one another, Edward realising, with epic self-restraint, that he could not bring Warwick to heel until he could be sure of military support to match the earl’s own, and Warwick trying to gauge the ramifications of his own inadvertent demonstration that, while Edward remained king, he could not govern without him. The truth was that the earl had few options left to consider. He could take Edward’s public magnanimity at face value; or he could take the logic of his own self-assertion to its obvious conclusion. He chose the latter. When the king took the field in March 1470 to quash a ‘popular’ revolt in Lincolnshire, it was to discover that the rebels were wearing the liveries of Warwick and Clarence, and interrogations carried out after the battle revealed that Warwick was now prepared to depose Edward and make Clarence England’s king.
Unfortunately for these rebel lords, however, no one else among Edward’s subjects was inclined to agree. Warwick’s determination to secure his ‘rightful’ place in government and Clarence’s vapid self-aggrandisement had taken them far beyond any sustainable conception of legitimate authority. When they found that they could command no support against Edward’s advancing army, they fled across the Channel, only to discover that Warwick had tried the loyalty of his faithful Calais garrison one step too far. With the harbour at Calais closed to them, his small party was left adrift at sea. The first son of Clarence and his eighteen-year-old duchess was born, and died, on board ship while they contemplated their fate.
It lay in France. Now, at last, was the moment for King Louis’s impossible plan to come to fruition. Edward must be removed from the throne, on that Warwick could finally agree. And the only credible contender to replace him – credible, that is, simply by virtue of the fact that he had already worn the crown for forty years – was the man Warwick’s father and brother had died to depose. Still, time had passed, and needs must. There was no way for Warwick but forward. And before him stood his oldest and most determined enemy.
Less than two months after Warwick’s small flotilla landed at Honfleur in Normandy, Margaret arrived at the royal palace of Amboise in the company of her son who, at sixteen, had grown to manhood in exile. He (it had been reported in Milan three years before) was as obsessed with military matters as his father was oblivious to them, talking ‘of nothing but of cutting off heads or making war, as if he had everything in his hands or was the god of battle or the peaceful possessor of that throne’. But Margaret still, as she had always done, made strategy in his name. And she faced an unwelcome choice.
For years her tirelessness in pursuing the rights of her husband and son had been matched only by the hopelessness of her task. Now, suddenly, real help and real hope were within her reach. But to grasp them she had to take the hand of a man she hated, despised and mistrusted. The more cynically political among her entourage, her chancellor John Fortescue among them, were quick to press the unanswerable logic of the case, but Margaret had been sustained through long years of conflict and isolation by her confidence in the justice of her cause and the impiousness of her enemies, and that was not so easily set aside. King Louis devoted all his attention to this newly honoured but frustratingly uncooperative guest, spending long days patiently closeted with the queen, who ‘until now’, the Milanese envoy noted on 29 June, ‘has shown herself very hard and difficult’.
The point on which she would not concede was the security of her son. He was crucial to this enterprise, the physical embodiment of the Lancastrian claim and the Lancastrian future, but Margaret had not kept him safe all these years to surrender him into Warwick’s dubious clutches. Still, Louis’s web, drawn about her in the silken surroundings of Amboise, was irresistible. Without Warwick, the Lancastrian future was nothing but a chimera. And so on 22 July in the great château of Angers beside the river Loire, the queen and the earl came face to face. When Warwick knelt before her to pledge his renewed allegiance, Margaret’s revulsion was such that she kept him on his knees for more than fifteen minutes. But the deal was done. Her son, the prince of Wales, was to marry Anne, the younger of Warwick’s two daughters. Warwick was to take ship immediately for England to restore King Henry to his throne. Only then, once the country was secure, would the queen and prince follow; and the prince would then rule as regent on his father’s behalf, with his father-in-law Warwick at his right hand in this new Lancastrian government.
With autumn approaching, and Louis keen to set his plan in motion and see the back of his English visitors, there was no time to lose. Warwick landed in the west country on 13 September, declaring that he had come with the authority of ‘the most noble princess Margaret, queen of England’ and that of her son the prince, to rescue ‘our most dread sovereign lord, King Henry the Sixth’ from the hands of ‘his great rebel and enemy, Edward, late earl of March, usurper, oppressor and destroyer of our said sovereign lord and of the noble blood of all the realm of England and of the good, true commons of the same’. The man who had done more than anyone else to put this ‘usurper’ on the throne could hardly have taken a more breathtakingly brazen stand, but Warwick did not hesitate. While the earl marched north, Margaret and her son and his new young wife remained at Amboise to wait for the good news.
It was startlingly quick to come. Edward was a perceptive politician and a commanding leader, but he could not free his hands from the the coils in which he now laboured. Six months earlier he had decided to restore the earldom of Northumberland to the Percy family, believing that only the Percys had the depth of support in the far north of England to secure the region against Warwick’s now hostile influence. But in doing so he had to take the earldom away from Warwick’s brother, Lord Montagu, whose reward it had been for his role in suppressing Lancastrian resistance in the early 1460s, and whose impeccable loyalty had not faltered even over the previous twelve months when it meant taking up arms against his own brother. Now, however, despite Edward’s best efforts to compensate him, Montagu was bitterly disillusioned. How much, the king discovered only when Montagu’s advancing troops were within ten miles of his encampment at Doncaster. Shaken messengers delivered the devastating news that Montagu had declared for Edward’s enemies, and intended not to help but to capture him.
The king’s forces were scattered and unprepared, caught between the armies of Warwick and Montagu, and Edward knew that this time he would not have long to live if he were captured. He decided to run, making at speed for the Norfolk coast – narrowly escaping the treacherous tides of the Wash as he did so – and from there found ships to take him to the Netherlands to seek asylum and support in the territories of the duke of Burgundy. Amid riots in London, Queen Elizabeth, who was heavily pregnant, fled into sanctuary at Westminster Abbey with her three small daughters. As Warwick and his army approached the capital, another of the earl’s brothers, the archbishop of York, seized control of the Tower and conveyed the dishevelled figure of Henry VI from his prison quarters to the lavish apartments the queen had so frantically vacated. And on 13 October, Warwick himself carried Henry’s train when the crown was ceremonially restored to the bemused king in the magnificent surroundings of St Paul’s.
When the news reached Paris, Louis ordered three days of celebration and thanksgiving at which Margaret and her son – now once again accorded the full estate and majesty of a queen and prince – were guests of honour. The speed of Edward’s fall had been greater than Margaret could possibly have hoped, and yet she did not hasten to the coast to take ship for England. The queen herself was in no hurry. After all the reverses, all the bloodshed of the last fifteen years, she would not let her son’s feet touch English soil until his security was assured.
And security, in England, was still hard to come by. For all the sumptuous ceremony on the streets of London and Paris, the suddenly restored Lancastrian regime was more patchwork and motley than ever. It rested on paper-thin foundations: returning Lancastrian exiles had to swallow their distaste and distrust to follow the lead of a Yorkist renegade, and Warwick found himself unable to restore their titles and estates without depriving those – himself included – who had benefited from their forfeitures. The position of the duke of Clarence, the other conspicuous Yorkist cuckoo in this supposedly Lancastrian nest, was becoming particularly invidious. Thwarted and purposeless now that Warwick’s conversion to the Lancastrian cause had removed all hope that he mightwear the crown himself, he was said to be ‘held in great suspicion, despite, disdain and hatred with all the lords, noblemen, and other, that were adherents and full partakers with Henry’. Henry himself was more confused than ever; the absent prince was still an unknown quantity, his unenviable position as Warwick’s new protégé scarcely reassuring for his kingdom’s future; and no one yet knew how Margaret’s forceful will might sit within a government that was already acutely unstable.
King Louis, meanwhile, was equally reluctant to despatch the queen and prince into Warwick’s care until his own conditions were met – in his case, the fulfilment of Warwick’s promise that England would join France in war against Burgundy. It took some time, given how full the earl’s hands already were, and the difficulties, political and practical, of imposing the pressures and costs of fighting overseas on a deeply troubled country. But at last, in February 1471, Warwick put his seal to a treaty with France and ordered the Calais garrison to move onto the offensive against Burgundy. Margaret and her son were already at the Norman port of Honfleur, and began to make preparations for their final journey to their recaptured kingdom. Still they were delayed. Every time they put to sea, headwinds drove them back to harbour; and it was not until Easter Sunday, 14 April, that the weary royal party stepped ashore at Weymouth in Dorset, where horses were waiting to take them fifteen miles north to rest at the Benedictine abbey at Cerne.
There their world fell apart. The same moment that had convinced them to take ship for England – Warwick’s declaration of war on Burgundy – had precipitated a chain of events that had undone everything they thought they knew when they left the coast of Normandy. Back in September, Duke Charles of Burgundy had not given an effusive welcome to the bedraggled figure of the fugitive King Edward on his arrival in Holland. Thanks to the treaty the two men had sealed in happier days, Edward was the duke’s brother-in-law, but the duke had no wish to be drawn into all-out war on his behalf, and sent conciliatory messages to the new regime in England through the duke of Exeter, a Lancastrian loyalist whom he had welcomed to his court after finding him begging in the street as a poverty-stricken exile. But this studied neutrality was no longer an option once Warwick had rebuffed his advances and announced England’s support for Louis’s war. In February 1471 Edward suddenly found that he had Burgundian money and ships at his disposal, and on 11 March, after the same agonising wait for favourable winds that was confining Margaret to the harbour at Honfleur, he set sail for England.
His position – at the head of a small band of fewer than a thousand soldiers driven by storms and by Warwick’s defences to land not in Norfolk, as he had hoped, but at Ravenspur in Yorkshire – was intensely dangerous. ‘It is a difficult matter to go out by the door and then wish to enter by the windows,’ came the laconic comment of the Milanese ambassador at Beauvais. ‘They think he will leave his skin there.’ But the fragility of Warwick’s regime was equally apparent. The two greatest northern lords, Warwick’s brother Montagu and Henry Percy, Montagu’s rival for the earldom of Northumberland, made no move to intercept Edward as he marched south into the midlands. At Coventry, the duke of Clarence threw himself on his brother’s mercy, hoping to save his own skin and salvage his political future from the bonfire of his hopes that his alliance with Warwick had now become. The panic-stricken inhabitants of London, terrified by these bewildering reverses, offered no resistance when Edward rode through their city gates on 11 April, to reclaim his crown and meet for the first time his baby son, the new heir to the Yorkist throne who had been born in the abbey sanctuary at Westminster five months earlier.
Two days later, Edward’s men were once again on the march, moving ten miles north to Barnet to confront the Lancastrian forces commanded by his cousin of Warwick. A decade earlier, it had been Margaret’s unexpected retreat from Barnet that had allowed Edward and Warwick, giddy with euphoria, to sweep into the capital together and unopposed to claim the crown for the Yorkist cause. Now all those old certainties were gone. Next morning, in the early hours of Easter Sunday – just as Margaret’s shipmaster was setting his course for the approach to Weymouth harbour – Edward gave the order to attack. The two armies fell on one another in the semi-darkness, shrouded by fog as dense as the confusion of enmities and loyalties at play on the field. Four hours later, fifteen hundred men lay slaughtered. Among them were Lord Montagu, his struggle with his conscience laid bare in the Yorkist badge found on his corpse under his Lancastrian armour, and beside him his brother Warwick, the self-appointed arbiter of England’s destiny finally brought to earth by a dagger thrust through his open visor.
Margaret, who had made the safety of her son the touchstone of her political strategy for a decade and a half, had brought him to England on the very day, almost at the very hour, when ten months of intricate preparation to secure his future collapsed into dust. She would not weep for Warwick, but she could not contemplate the ruin of their plans without exhaustion and fear. But all was not lost. Her son was still unharmed; their forces were massing in the south-west; and there might yet be great advantage, once Edward was defeated, in the opportunity to rule without Warwick’s oppressive and demanding presence. The queen, the prince and their military lieutenant, yet another faithful duke of Somerset – Edmund Beaufort, younger brother of the Somerset who had died at Hexham – pressed on northward towards the Severn estuary, intending to cross into Wales to rendezvous with forces under the command of Jasper Tudor. King Edward, meanwhile, mustered fresh troops of his own and set out to intercept them, proclaiming as he went that death would be the penalty for anyone offering help to ‘Margaret, calling her queen, which is a Frenchwoman born’ or her son.
Confusion and panic reigned. ‘The world is right queasy,’ wrote Sir John Paston with impressive understatement, having escaped with his life from Warwick’s defeated army at Barnet. Sforza de’ Bettini, contemplating from his ambassadorial post in France the difficulty of procuring reliable information to send to his master in Milan, was more forthright. ‘I wish the country and the people were plunged deep in the sea because of their lack of stability,’ he said feelingly, ‘for I feel like one going to the torture when I write about them, and no one ever hears twice alike about English affairs.’ An Italian resident in Bruges had more patience with the unfolding drama: ‘King Edward has set out with his power to look for the queen and prince, who had landed and gone to the parts of Wales,’ he told his father. ‘We have heard nothing since, although we are greedy for news. There are many who consider the queen’s prospects favourable, chiefly because of the death of Warwick, because it is reckoned she ought to have many lords in her favour who intended to resist her because they were enemies of Warwick.’ The truth, whichever way one looked at it, was that everything now depended on this pell-mell chase across country.
The queen and her army pressed on as hard as they could, but Edward had sent messages ahead to warn the keeper of Gloucester Castle to bar the gates against them. Unable to gain access that way to the bridge across the Severn, they had no choice but to push on to the next crossing-place, a ford at Tewkesbury. Edward’s forces, meanwhile, were bearing down on them, a forced march of thirty-six miles on 3 May bringing them within three miles of Margaret’s troops. Early the next morning, it became clear that the queen and prince could not reach their reinforcements in Wales without first confronting their enemy. Yet again, Margaret was left to hurry to the safety of a nearby monastery while her army mustered in battle array. For the first time, however, her beloved son’s fate was out of her hands. The seventeen-year-old prince commanded the centre of the Lancastrian army; at last he could put to use the years of military training at Koeur. Today, he would either win his father’s crown, or lose his life.
The end, when it came, was quick. First Edward’s soldiers broke the Lancastrian vanguard under the duke of Somerset, who turned and fled to Tewkesbury’s great abbey, though sanctuary, in the end, could not save him. And then, amid the carnage of that rout, Edward himself led an assault on the prince’s position. Margaret’s son died where he fell. The whereabouts of the queen herself were not discovered for three more days, but she did not try to run. She had nowhere to go, and no one left to fight for. She was brought to Edward at Coventry, once her citadel, now a place of humiliation and grief. And when the victorious king made his triumphant entry into London, with trumpets sounding and his loyal lords about him, there was a chariot at the back of the procession in which the queen sat, straight-backed and blank-faced, staring at nothing.
The day after their arrival in the capital, the body of Henry VI was brought out of the Tower. The Londoners were told that their former king had died of ‘pure displeasure and melancholy’ at news of his son’s death and the destruction of his cause, but few doubted that his life had been ended on King Edward’s orders. There was no advantage, now, in keeping alive a Lancastrian puppet when the whole Lancastrian line could be extinguished. For one night, his corpse was displayed to public view on a bier at St Paul’s, its face uncovered, to forestall seditious rumours of his survival. The next day, it was placed on a barge and rowed twenty miles upriver for burial at the ancient abbey of Chertsey. ‘And so no one from that stock remained among the living who could claim the crown,’ one contemporary solemnly noted.
Margaret was forty-one years old, and her life was over. For Edward, and for Louis of France and Charles of Burgundy, manoeuvring furiously for advantage in this changed political world, she was an irrelevance. In June rumours reached France that Margaret too had been assassinated, but Edward was by nature magnanimous rather than vindictive, and he had no need to pay her the political compliment of a violent death. Instead she remained a prisoner, at first in apartments at Windsor Castle and the Tower of London, and later – the king extending his easy generosity even to this bitterest of enemies – at Wallingford Castle forty miles west of London, in the gentler custody of her old friend Alice Chaucer, the dowager duchess of Suffolk, who had been kind to her when she had first left her family behind to embark on her future as England’s queen.
She had been a captive for four years when, in 1475, her fate constituted one of the detailed provisions of a peace treaty agreed at Picquigny between Edward and Louis. By its terms she renounced any claim she might notionally still have to rights or properties in England, and the French king agreed to ransom her person for a sum of £10,000. Free, but penniless and purposeless, she went to live quietly in her father’s lands of Anjou. She was at the château of Dampierre, overlooking the broad meanderings of the Seine, when she fell ill in the summer heat of 1482. She died on 25 August, her end scarcely noticed by the crowned heads of Europe, and was buried beside her father beneath the soaring arches of the cathedral at Angers.
Margaret was a woman of will and wit – ‘more wittier than the king’, noted one chronicler, although that was a backhanded tribute given the manifest limitations of her foolish, fragile husband. Denied the formal regency that she might have enjoyed in her French homeland, all her fierce energy was devoted to the task of impersonating, of reconstituting by other means, the royal will that her husband was incapable of providing. The magnitude of her role was evident to those who watched her at work: for Prospero di Camulio in 1461, for example, the battle of Wakefield was simply ‘the battle which the queen of England fought against the late duke of York’ – a description remarkable in its directness given that Margaret could not, and did not, set foot on the field of war.
But the magnitude of her role was its own undoing. In stepping forward to champion her husband’s cause, she exposed the composite authority she had constructed in his name to public view, and herself to vitriolic disapproval. The harder she fought – and fight hard she did, with an implacable and partisan tenacity – the more obvious were the tensions created by a French queen acting in the place of an incompetent English king. And, little by little, the power she could command fragmented and crumbled away. As an Italian in London noted as the conflict came to its height in 1461, ‘whoever conquers, the crown of England loses, which is a very great pity …’
That much became evident just eight months after her death. Edward’s conquering regime was carefully constructed and authoritatively led, but its roots were not yet deep. In April 1483, shockingly and suddenly, he succumbed to a stroke at the age of just forty, a golden boy bloated into dissolution; and his government collapsed into chaos. The twelve-year-old heir to the throne – the baby boy born to Edward and Elizabeth in the Westminster sanctuary – was deposed and murdered by Edward’s youngest brother and most trusted lieutenant, Richard of Gloucester. And the usurpation of Richard III, as the new king called himself, opened the door to a penniless exile named Henry Tudor, Jasper Tudor’s nephew, whose mother Margaret was the last of Henry VI’s Beaufort cousins – a tenuous connection to the royal line, but enough, amid the trauma of 1485, to rally an army. That summer Richard III lost his crown and his life at Bosworth Field, and Henry Tudor took his place as King Henry VII. It was the last act of the drama which had consumed Margaret’s life.