CHAPTER VIII
1
THE day that Queen Margaret reached the abbey of Cerne to rest after the fatigues of her long sea voyage the word reached her of the defeat and death of Warwick at Barnet. She fell to the floor in a swoon. When she recovered, she loudly bewailed her misfortunes.
“I would rather die,” she cried, “than live longer in this state!”
For the first time in her life of tragic conflict, the queen was willing to consider the Lancastrian cause as lost. Henry VI was still alive but a prisoner in the Tower of London. He would be allowed to live as long as possible by the Yorkists for an obvious reason: any further efforts to renew the struggle would be weakened by the necessity of placing the old man back on the throne, in the event of success. The son of the marriage, young Prince Edward, was high-spirited and brave. He would make a much stronger candidate for the throne than “Harry,” whose gentleness and deeply religious turn of mind would always win him affection—as a man but not necessarily as a king. Queen Margaret was completely realistic and knew that Edward IV would react in the same way she would to certain possible developments. For instance, if young Prince Edward were killed, there would no longer be any reason to keep the poor old prisoner alive.
Because of this the bitterly depressed queen announced that she would return to the continent and that her son would accompany her. Back of the decision, undoubtedly, was the unexpressed thought that in the course of the years the opportunity might arise for him to come back to England and fight again for his rights.
If she had adhered to this decision, the lives of many thousands of men would have been saved, including the two she valued most in all the world—her husband and her son.
Margaret moved to Beaulieu Abbey in the New Forest, where she was joined by the Lancastrian leaders who had survived the battle, as well as by the widowed Countess of Warwick and her daughter Anne. They urged her not to give up. At first she refused, being still convinced of the wisdom of her decision. Then the young Duke of Somerset arrived and took matters into his hands. He had commanded the center at Barnet and had fought creditably. It perhaps should be pointed out that he was the son of the Somerset whose name had been linked with that of the queen in the question of the paternity of Edward, a completely false and absurd charge which only a political tactician as Machiavellian as Warwick would have dared to voice. Margaret’s loyalties ran as deep as her enmities. She still liked and believed in the Somersets, and in fact the whole Beaufort connection. When the young duke, believing himself a great military leader, arrived at the abbey, he began a blustering argument in favor of continuing the struggle. Margaret was weak enough to listen.
It is true that Edward of York (so ran the theme of his discourse) defeated and killed Warwick. Is that any reason for fearing him, for believing him invincible? Has it been forgotten that Your Majesty also defeated Warwick at the second Battle of St. Albans?
The swords of all true Englishmen, continued the highly confident Somerset, would be drawn in her support if she animated them by her presence and her wisdom. Coming down to details, he proposed that they proceed without delay to raise an army in the west and north, where Lancastrian sentiment was strongest. Margaret, in an evil moment, allowed herself to be persuaded.
An army of probably 5000 men was raised, a small force in contrast to the unwieldy numbers who had fought to the death at the second Battle of St. Albans, at Towton, and at Barnet. Edward, now wearing his crown again, marched west to meet her with an army somewhat smaller. There were two reasons for this shrinkage in the ranks. First, men had become tired of the incessant struggle and now refused to gamble their lives and their properties any longer. Second, the losses had been great enough to diminish seriously the number of active fighting men. England, in other words, was worn out.
The two armies met at Tewkesbury, close to the junction point of the Severn and the Avon rivers, in a savage and merciless battle. Edward was again the victor.
Barnet had been the decisive battle of the war. Tewkesbury was, in a sense, therefore, an anti-climax. It is chiefly noteworthy because of the death of the young prince and the capture of Queen Margaret. Some of the chronicles of the day declared that the prince was killed in the field, crying vainly for help to his prospective brother-in-law, Clarence. It is believed by others that the youth was taken prisoner and led into the presence of the victorious Edward.
“How durst ye enter my realms with banners displayed against me?” demanded the king.
“To recover my father’s crown and mine own inheritance,” was the bold response.
In a rage Edward struck him in the face with his gauntleted hand. Whereupon the knightly train about the king surrounded the slender young hope of the Lancastrians and killed him with their daggers. This version is termed by one historian “a more detailed account written in the next generation.” In other words, it is a story told during the reign of Henry VII when nothing was written or published that did not conform with the wishes of that strange king.
The captive queen was taken to London and placed in the Tower, in one of the smallest cells in that great stone breeding place of human grief and despair. The old king was close by in the Wakefield Tower, with his devotional books and the companionship of a melancholy canary. He died the same night that his wife was brought there, some say, of “pure displeasure and grief,” and some say at the hands of assassins.
The next day the body of the dead king, poor Harry of Windsor, was exposed to public view at Black Friar’s and then removed to Chertsey for burial. The Lancastrian line had come to an end in disaster and death.
2
The once lovely Margaret of Anjou emerged from the tower a middle-aged woman. The years and the strains of war had taken their toll. Her shoulders and neck had thickened, her hair was streaked with gray, her eyes were red from weeping. Her cheeks had enough lines to bear some resemblance to the charts of battlefields on which she had fought.
Edward considered the possibility of executing her to still forever her vitriolic tongue, but concluded that the chivalrous record of the Plantagenets must not be stained by the death of a woman. Accordingly she was sent from one dismal castle to another although the rigors of her confinement were gradually reduced through the mediation, it was said, of Queen Elizabeth. Finally she came to Wallingford, one of the large stone strongholds on the Thames, where she was in the charge of the dowager Duchess of Suffolk. The duchess was very kind to the unfortunate captive and kept her comfortably on the five marks a week allotted by the chancellery for the ex-queen’s upkeep. She was still there when word came that arrangements had been made for her to be ransomed and sent back to France.
She knew it was not going to be a joyous homecoming, in fact no homecoming at all. She had lived in England so long that the memories of her girlhood had grown shadowy; and, of course, the dust of her two men would remain forever in English ground. To make matters worse, it had been necessary for her father, blithe Duke René, to diminish further his domain by selling Provence to Louis XI to raise the ransom money. That wily monarch had waited patiently for the chance, his covetous hands twitching for the satisfaction of grasping that beautiful southern land. He had bided his time with rather more than his usual patience (and of that he had more than any other man) and had not stepped in until misfortunes had begun to thicken about the aging René.
The latter took enough time from his new young wife and his endless preoccupation with his painting (he had now gone into murals) and his musical compositions to make a “deal” with the watchful Louis. He sold Provence for the sum of 50,000 crowns, which amount was to be used for the ransom of Margaret. Louis, who could act with lightning speed when his terms had been met, made an agreement immediately with Edward of England. The first installment, a fifth, was paid to Edward on November 3, 1475, and in January of the following year the disconsolate widow arrived at Dieppe. It was demanded of her that she sign away all her rights before being set free. With a resignation which showed how completely her spirit had been broken, she signed her name to a brusque document which began:
I, Margaret, formerly in England married, renounce all that I could pretend to in England by the conditions of my marriage, with all other things there to Edward now king of England.
This humiliating step having been taken, she proceeded with a train consisting of no more than three ladies and seven gentlemen to the domicile which had been selected for her, the manor of Reculée. There is nothing on record to show that she ever saw her father in the flesh, although he wrote her fond letters and tried to assure her future by grants which were summarily revoked by the French king. As a result, Margaret had to subsist on a pension which Louis granted her in return for another document in which she surrendered all her rights of succession to the lands and honors of her father and mother.
Reculée lay no more than a league away from Angers, where all her final misfortunes had begun. Did Louis cast his mind back over the time when he had exerted so much pressure to arrange the meeting with the confident Warwick in the latter city? If he did, it would be with a sense of satisfaction over the results of those protracted and difficult negotiations. Warwick was dead and England was too exhausted to cause him, Louis, a single night of sleeplessness or concern. Burgundy was being dealt with to his own advantage. And here was the firebrand queen, broken in spirit and content to live on the pittance he allowed her. The plans laid at Angers had proven most successful from his standpoint.
Margaret remained several years at Reculée, where she found it necessary to provide for the wants of a number of exiled Lancastrians. Her health was permanently impaired, and one French historian draws a most dire picture of her appearance—“eyes hollow, dim and perpetually inflamed, her skin disfigured with a dry, scaly leprosy.” This was an exaggeration, but there could be no doubt that she showed signs of the approaching end.
Finally she left Reculée and took up her residence in the castle of Dampierre, which was close to the city of Saumur. This ancient town on the Loire River was famous for its churches and for the Maison de la Reine Cécile which her father had built. It is doubtful if she ever visited the town or saw the house her father had fashioned with such genuine care. Her life was spent in poverty, as the parsimonious king was apt to delay the payments due her and even, on occasions, to overlook them entirely.
Some believe she had a hand in the intrigues and preparations which led to the victory of Henry of Richmond at Bosworth and his elevation to the throne as Henry VII. This is highly improbable. She had lost her position of influence and her will lacked the iron inflexibility of her earlier years. She was not concerned over the throne of England since it could not be her son who would sit there under the Leopard banner. All interest in worldly affairs seems to have deserted her. Did she ever think of the needless prolongation of the war because of her fierce determination, of the terrible battles which were nothing less than mass murder, of the tens of thousands of widows who had been left to mourn their dead as she herself was now doing?
The household at Dampierre was a sorry one. A few exiles still remained with her, but she kept so strictly to her own rooms that they never saw her. Hopeless, dispirited, they sat about in glum groups and talked of the losses they had sustained in the Lancastrian cause. If they walked in the meager gardens, they had no eyes for the red roses growing there. These had become symbols of the blank future stretching ahead of them.
On August 2, 1482, Margaret made her will, a pitiable document in which she left what little she had to those about her and to provide for the payment of her debts. This done, she was content to take leave of life. On August 25, Margaret, “formerly in England married” and now in France a widow, with only one painting (not of her father’s work) on the wall above her bed to represent the arms of England, the queen of sorrows and enmities who had shown so much of the heroic in her will to fight, passed quickly away.