Blood Sisters (14 page)

Jasper Tudor had never flagged in his support for the cause of Henry VI, and in the summer of 1468 – just weeks after Margaret had set sail for Burgundy – he landed in Wales with three ships provided by the French king Louis. It was too small a force for a serious invasion but it represented, as it was intended to, an embarrassment for King Edward. As one of Edward’s chief supporters in Wales, William Herbert was ordered to raise troops and ride against Jasper Tudor. Herbert was also Henry Tudor’s guardian, and he took the twelve-year-old boy with him for his first taste of action. Jasper and Henry, uncle and nephew, were on opposite sides of the battlefield, but luckily neither saw dreadful consequences that day. Even so, the thought of the danger in which her son had been put must have been terrifying for Margaret.

Indeed, Margaret Beaufort’s position had already been undermined by the actions of her extended family. At the start of his reign Edward had shown her and her husband a certain amount of generosity, granting them the great moated manor house of Woking
¹⁰
where they made a luxurious home. It looked as if the Beaufort fortunes were slowly rising again. In 1463 Margaret’s cousin Henry, the third Duke of Somerset, had accepted a pardon and received many favours from the new king. But only the next year Somerset had betrayed Edward and been summarily executed. His younger brother and heir, the fourth duke, became a leader of the Lancastrian exiles. After that, the king could hardly be blamed if he looked on all Beauforts warily.

NINE

Domestic Broils

and domestic broils

Clean over-blown, themselves the conquerors

Make war upon themselves, brother to brother

Richard III
, 2.4

It would swiftly become apparent that the threat from surviving Lancastrians was not the only one that Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville faced. The Yorkist dynasty was soon in greater danger from divisions within. Warwick had been growing steadily more dissatisfied both with his position under Edward’s rule and with Woodville prominence. As the ally of Edward’s father York, and as guiding spirit of Edward’s own military takeover, he had naturally expected to play a pre-eminent part in the management of the country. But as the new king settled ever more firmly into the seat of power, Warwick found himself increasingly alienated. And as he began to move against Edward, he found himself an extraordinary ally.

George, Duke of Clarence was likewise disaffected, resentful of his position as a mere adjunct to his brother’s regime. For a while he had hoped to find an alternative sphere of influence. There was talk of a second Burgundian marriage, with Clarence marrying Charles of Burgundy’s daughter and heiress presumptive Mary. But that came to nothing, perhaps because Edward would have been dubious about giving Clarence access to a foreign crown.

Instead, on 12 July 1469 the nineteen-year-old Clarence, described by contemporaries as ‘seemly of person and well-visaged’ as well as ‘right witty’, married Warwick’s elder daughter Isabel, just a year younger than he. This was another marriage choice of which his brother the king disapproved. The ‘Worcester’
¹¹
chronicle suggests that two years earlier he had forbidden it, and had blocked attempts to secure the papal dispensation necessary for two second cousins to marry. For Edward, the erratic Clarence would be a potential weapon in Warwick’s hands. In addition, until the king had a son Clarence was his likeliest heir, so Edward had a strong vested interest in negotiating a marriage for the benefit of the country. Warwick and Clarence had therefore arranged for the marriage to Isabel to take place in the earl’s own jurisdiction of Calais, away from Edward’s eye.

Clarence’s position in the line of succession was obviously of prime importance to his new father-in-law. It was around this time and on the continent among Warwick’s allies that rumours of Edward’s bastardy can first be traced with certainty – rumours that implied Clarence was the true heir of the Yorkist monarchy. It has been suggested that Clarence’s mother Cecily had now told him this was true:
¹²
that his elder brother had been conceived in adultery. (It was in 1469 that Edward asked his mother to exchange the castle of Fotheringhay, into which she had poured both money and effort, for the somewhat run-down Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire; this could be interpreted as punishment for spreading damaging rumours, or simply for a too-visible partiality on her part.) Certainly Cecily travelled to Sandwich in Kent, the port from which the wedding party was leaving; and she may have done so to give them her blessing. Not only was Clarence her son but Isabel her goddaughter, an important connection in the fifteenth century. She may, however, have been hoping instead to dissuade Clarence from a plan that could only divide her family.

Warwick and Clarence had issued a proclamation inveighing against certain ‘seditious persons’ prominent at Edward’s court, notably Elizabeth Woodville’s father, brothers and mother – interestingly, the only woman named. (To have named the queen herself would have been a little too close to the bone.) The day after the wedding Warwick and Clarence sailed to England, almost certainly leaving their womenfolk to follow later. On 29 July Warwick managed to capture Edward and took him north to imprisonment in Yorkshire. In August Margaret Beaufort, ever the opportunist, visited the London residence of the newly prominent Clarence, hoping to negotiate over those lands of Henry’s which he held, and surely to regain custody of her son.

The terrible news hit Queen Elizabeth while on a formal visit to Norwich. It was only four months after the birth of her third daughter, named Cecily for her grandmother. Warwick had captured her father, and her brother John, after the battle of Edgecote and executed them without trial.

Elizabeth returned to London, to live in ‘scant state’. Fearful for her husband, she had also to cope with accusations of witchcraft brought against her mother (possibly as a precursor to declaring invalid the marriage Jacquetta had helped to make). As evidence, a Northamptonshire gentleman called Thomas Wake produced ‘an image of lead made like a man of arms the length of a man’s finger broken in the middle and made fast with a wire’; along with two other images, of a man and a woman, which he claimed Jacquetta had commissioned as a means of binding the king and her daughter together. Witchcraft was a serious allegation – one of the few from which even royal rank would not protect a woman.
^fn5

Jacquetta, however, had allies behind her – and not only her relations. Her intercession with Marguerite on behalf of London almost a decade earlier had won her friends in the city, to whose authorities she now appealed for support. The wheel of Fortune was about to spin again. There was not enough support for Warwick’s coup. Edward escaped from captivity on 10 September and reached London in October, making a triumphal entry into the city. He commanded that the charges against his mother-in-law be examined, and by January 1470 Jacquetta had been cleared of the ‘said slander’. If Thomas Wake had been, as seems likely, a pawn of Clarence and Warwick, Jacquetta had been yet another woman to suffer because of the friction between the York brothers.

In December at Westminster Edward staged a deliberately public reconciliation with his brother Clarence and cousin Warwick; but as John Paston reported, though the two lords claimed now to be the king’s best friends, ‘his household men have other language, so what shall hastily fall I cannot say’. Cecily and her daughters would probably have been working
¹³
for a real rapprochement. Efforts were made, too, to reconcile the cousinship: young Elizabeth of York was betrothed to Warwick’s nephew, suggesting that if Edward failed to produce a son the crown might pass to his daughter rather than to Clarence in the collateral male line. If this were true, however, it would have pushed Clarence even further in his opposition to Edward – the more so since there was also now discussion of restoring young Henry Tudor to his father’s earldom of Richmond, greatly to the detriment of Clarence who had been holding the associated lands.

The peacemaking attempts were in vain. Clarence and Warwick quickly returned north, and perhaps the only one to gain was Marguerite, since Louis of France had responded to the Yorkist confusion by inviting the Lancastrian queen to his court. Here she enjoyed not only a reunion with her father, but the promise of French support. Back in England, in early 1470 more rebellions broke out. In March Cecily invited Edward and Clarence to Baynard’s Castle, her London home, in an attempt to bring about an agreement, but to no avail. Warwick and Clarence then instituted fresh uprisings. When Edward rode out to deal with them Margaret Beaufort’s husband, the peaceable Henry Stafford, was summoned to arm himself and ride out with him. After Margaret’s misguided attempt to negotiate with Clarence the previous autumn, there was need for a proof of loyalty.

In April Warwick, and the wife and daughters who had now joined him and Clarence, were forced to flee. Their confidence in finding safe haven in Warwick’s territory of Calais was, however, misplaced: the city was closed against them. This was bad news for everybody but disastrous for the heavily pregnant lsabel who, with probably only her mother and sister as attendants, went into labour on the tiny heaving ship with only two flagons of wine sent by the Calais commander for her relief. Her baby was stillborn.

It was the beginning of May before the party were allowed to make landfall in Normandy, and then perhaps only because Louis had decided that the diplomatic treaties which prevented him from openly helping Warwick permitted him to give refuge to the ladies. Spare a thought for Anne Neville here: besides the general misfortune that had befallen her family, she must have known that her own hopes of making a good marriage had declined dramatically. Until, that is, she heard what fortune – or her father – had in store.

Edward in England now had two enemies in exile: Warwick, and Marguerite of Anjou. As far back as 1467, it was claimed, some believed the earl ‘favoured Queen Margaret’s party’. Whether or not this was true, it may now have been the serpentine brain of Louis – the ‘spider king’ whose machinations Machiavelli observed before writing
The Prince
– that conceived the idea of making an alliance between these two, themselves long the bitterest of enemies. And the age knew only one good way of cementing that sort of alliance: marriage.

Marguerite had an unmarried son, Warwick an unmarried daughter. The Milanese ambassador to the French court gives a long account of Louis trying to persuade Marguerite to endorse the Warwick marriage, and of how she had shown herself ‘very hard and difficult’, keeping the earl on his knees before her as she railed. Another account,
The Manner and Guiding of the Earl of Warwick at Angers in July and August 1470
, agrees that she was ‘right dificyle’. Not only, she exploded, had Warwick ‘injured her as a queen, but he had dared to defame her reputation as a woman by divers false and malicious slanders’.

Anne’s feelings about the plan can only be guessed at. The little that is known of her prospective bridegroom, another Edward, is not attractive. The Milanese envoy reported that, as a child, he talked of nothing but cutting off heads. Hall would describe him as having matured into ‘a goodly girlish looking and well featured young gentleman’. Still, by the very nature of diplomacy a high-ranking girl was at least as likely to be married to an enemy as to a friend. And of course it was a splendid match – if Henry VI’s throne could but be regained for him. But even in an age when most aristocratic marriages were bargains, few brides (Elizabeth Woodville apart) can have had to face quite such a furious reception from their prospective mother-in-law.

The two accounts vary a little over the timing, but
The
Manner and Guiding
claims that Queen Marguerite held out for fifteen days
¹⁴
against every argument the king of France could show her. ‘Some time she said that she saw never honour nor profit for her, nor for her son the Prince. In other [times] she [al]ledged that and she would, she should find a more profitable party, and of more advantage, with the King of England. And indeed, she showed unto the King of France a Letter which she said was sent her out of England the last week, by the which was offered to her son My Lady the Princess’ – that is, Elizabeth of York.

Even when Marguerite had given in, the marriage treaty was packed full of conditions, not least ‘that from thence forth the said daughter of the Earl of Warwick [Anne] shall be put and remain in the hands and keeping of Queen Margaret’, and that ‘the said marriage shall not be perfected to [until] the Earl of Warwick had been with an army over the Sea into England, and that he had recovered the realm of England …’ . If he failed to do so, Anne was presumably to have been left high and dry. But the Milanese ambassador suggests rather that the marriage had to be delayed by the need to wait for a papal dispensation since this couple, like so many others, were related by blood, in the fourth degree.

Warwick and Clarence set sail, to land in the West Country in mid-September 1470. They claimed always to be doing so in the name of King Henry and ‘by the assent of the most noble princess, Margaret, Queen of England’ and her son. King Edward was in the north, trying to put down a rebellion organised by Warwick’s brother-in-law; having moved his pregnant wife and daughters into the Tower (which Elizabeth, as the contemporary
Warkworth’s Chronicle
says, ‘well victualled and fortified’) for safety while he was away. Soon Marguerite and her son, together with the young Anne at Amboise in France, heard of a great victory.