She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (46 page)

While Henry entered Paris in triumph, the heir he had supplanted – his new brother-in-law, the dauphin Charles – was forced to withdraw south to the Loire to shelter in the great castles of Anjou under the protection of its widowed duchess, Yolanda of Aragon, whose daughter Marie he married in 1422. But Henry’s brightly burning flame was soon consumed by its own ferocity. He died of dysentery at Vincennes, south-east of Paris, at the age of just thirty-five, leaving as his successor a baby son he had never seen. For long years after his death the nobles of England worked together to defend his legacy in the name of this infant king, Henry VI, but during that time the French regrouped, rearmed, and renewed a war that the English had believed they had already won.

In 1429 French military resistance was given overwhelming moral force when – thanks to the unearthly inspiration of a peasant girl named Jeanne d’Arc – the dauphin Charles was anointed and crowned as King Charles VII at Reims Cathedral, the site where, by hallowed tradition, the monarchs of France were invested with their divinely sanctioned authority. In response, the English lords scrambled to arrange coronations for the boy-king Henry VI on both sides of the Channel, but the improvised ceremonial with which he was crowned king of France in Paris only served to emphasise the solemnity of his rival’s consecration. Thereafter, the
French began to win territory and fortifications as well as hearts and minds. Paris itself was recaptured in 1436, and by the early 1440s the tide of the war was turning in their favour, while the English dug in their heels in defence of their increasingly embattled hold on Normandy. And it was in this context that young Margaret of Anjou’s marriage suddenly became a matter of urgent diplomatic significance.

At the beginning of 1444 the English sought a truce, an honourable breathing-space in which they might hope to construct a strategic response to this alarming French resurgence – and no better opportunity to stop the fighting was likely to present itself than their young king’s need for a wife. Charles VII was graciously amenable to the unwontedly conciliatory tone of the English approach, but, though he himself had daughters, their hands were not offered in marriage – not because they were King Henry’s first cousins (papal dispensation could set aside such entanglements of blood, after all), but because Henry still claimed their father’s crown. A bride would have to be found who could embody the cause of peace without loss of face or the necessity of concessions unacceptable to either side.

So it was that all eyes came to alight on Margaret, who turned fourteen while the embassies were mustering in March that year. Her aunt Marie was Charles VII’s queen; her grandmother Yolanda had been his greatest support in the darkest days of his disinheritance. And, although her impecunious family could offer England little by way of a dowry – only some cobbled-together cash and her father’s meaningless titles to the islands of Mallorca and Minorca – her father René was nevertheless a respected figure at the French court, and his duchy of Anjou promised to provide a useful buffer immediately to the south of the beleaguered English duchy of Normandy. It was enough, and this compromise bride served to patch together a compromise treaty – not a permanent peace, but a two-year truce, with the hope of further understanding to come.

On 24 May 1444, Margaret walked in procession into the great church of St Martin at Tours, her step made heavy by the richfur
-trimmed stuff of her gown, watched by her uncle the king and her aunt the queen, her cousin the dauphin and his Scottish dauphine, and all the great nobles of France. There, before the altar, she met not her husband-to-be, but the man who had represented him on this mission: William de la Pole, the forty-seven-year-old earl of Suffolk, an intelligent, cultured man of long experience in the war who had risen to become the most influential of Henry VI’s noble counsellors. It was Suffolk who placed the golden ring on her finger to symbolise her betrothal (which was as binding as it would have been had Henry himself spoken the vows with her, and needed only the consummation of the marriage to make it indissoluble). And it was Suffolk who led her by the hand to receive the acclamation of the assembled congregation as the new queen of England.

For six months after the glittering celebrations that followed the ceremony at Tours, Margaret remained with her mother in Anjou, honoured as a queen but, for as long as she remained in her homeland, required to shoulder none of a consort’s responsibilities, either political or personal. In November, however, Suffolk – now promoted to the rank of marquis in recognition of his devoted service in securing his king both a peace and a wife – returned to France at the head of a still more lavish delegation to escort her across the Channel. It was five more months before they set sail: time enough to attend the magnificent wedding of her sister Yolande to the son and heir of Antoine de Vaudemont, her father’s rival for Lorraine, before taking leave of her parents for the last time. By the time Margaret and her attendants reached Rouen, the capital of English Normandy, she was too unwell – whether victim of an ill-timed infection, or of the unfamiliar pressures of public expectation – to take part in the elaborate procession planned for her entry into the city. It went ahead nonetheless, with her place at its centre taken by Suffolk’s wife, Alice Chaucer, in a striking demonstration of the fact that the young queen’s role was as yet formulaic rather than functional, her power symbolic rather than real.

Alice Chaucer, at forty, was every inch the equal of her eminent husband, with the quicksilver intelligence of her grandfather, the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, and all the political sophistication of a three-times-married heiress who had acquired her first influential husband at the age of just ten. She was also a new mother – her only son, John, had been born two years earlier – and she welcomed Margaret, a queen young enough to be her daughter, with a kindness that quickly forged a deep-rooted friendship between them. Such comfort was more than welcome to a girl who was not fully restored to health by the time she braved a violently storm-tossed Channel crossing. Two weeks passed after her arrival at Southampton before she was well enough to travel ten miles to the modestly austere abbey of Titchfield to embark in earnest on the reality of her royal marriage.

This time, the man placing the wedding ring on her finger – a band set with a great ruby from a ring he had worn at his coronation in Paris fourteen years earlier – was not the fatherly figure of the marquis of Suffolk, but her husband, Henry VI of England. At twenty-three, Henry was eight years her senior; he stood five feet nine, with a physique strong enough to enjoy the hunt in his many royal parks and chases, and in his exquisitely made cloth-of-gold robes he cut an attractive figure. In his face, however, there was none of the grim purpose which had marked out his driven, charismatic father, nor any of the battle scars the older Henry had acquired before he was out of his teens.

This king was seven years older than his father had been when he first led an army in the field, six older than his great-great-grandfather Edward III when he masterminded the coup that overthrew the rule of Isabella and Mortimer; yet Henry still approached the world with a wondering, abstracted air that recalled the simplicity of childhood. His nobles were still – disconcertingly for themselves, as well as for the rest of his subjects – minutely involved in the direction of his government in much the same way as they had been when he was a boy. And, despite the fact that the most pressing of their concerns was the long-drawn-out struggle to protect
what was left of his father’s conquests in France, the young king showed no flicker of interest in crossing the Channel to take command of his own army – and his lords made no effort to persuade him, perhaps surmising that his artless presence in the military or diplomatic front line would be more hindrance than help to their efforts. Still, for Margaret at least he was kind and welcoming, not an intimidatingly experienced older man but an innocent so unworldly that he sometimes found himself affronted by the sophisticated manners and supple morals of his own court.

In her husband’s reassuringly gentle company the young queen rode to her new capital. There, during the previous summer, it had taken the mayor and aldermen three weeks of heated debate to decide on the colour of the outfits in which they planned to accord her a formal welcome. Now, dressed in their much-discussed blue gowns with scarlet hoods, this august deputation met her at Blackheath on the south side of the Thames on 28 May 1445, and escorted her through the city in an elaborate procession which, over the course of two days, took her past eight specially devised pageants performed on stages constructed along her route. At London Bridge she was greeted by the lavishly gowned and garlanded figure of ‘Plenty’, before ‘Peace’ stepped forward to expound with laboured dignity on the expectations that weighed so heavily on this marriage:

It was an onerous responsibility to rest on the slight shoulders of a fifteen-year-old girl, but perhaps a granddaughter schooled by the formidable Yolanda of Aragon expected no less a duty than to
be the means of peace between two kingdoms that had fought for a hundred years. Certainly Margaret did not falter as she was carried in a litter to Westminster Abbey for her coronation, dressed in white damask powdered with gold and a pearl-encrusted circlet resting on her loosened hair, while her subjects cheered, their hearts warmed and their hopes raised by the wine that flowed for this celebratory moment in the city’s conduits.

But – as the hangovers faded, the capital settled back into hustling, jostling normality, and the queen set about the task of fulfilling her new role – it gradually became clear that there was nothing simple about what she was required to do. Comforting though it might be to a young bride, King Henry’s benevolent vagueness posed an insidious threat to the entire edifice of the government that was conducted in his name. Only the king, after all, had the God-given authority to adjudicate between the competing concerns and opinions of his subjects in order to rule in the interests of the realm as a whole. A king such as Edward II – who had ruled in the interests of Hugh Despenser rather than any approximation of the common good – had found that he might forfeit that authority, with catastrophic consequences. But Henry was not a tyrant. Instead, he simply smiled and nodded and expressed mild amazement at the workings of the world – ‘St John, grant mercy!’ was a favourite exclamation – before agreeing to whatever proposal was presently placed before him.

The individual authors of such proposals might feel a glow of satisfaction that the king had shown such excellent judgement in endorsing their petitions. Cumulatively, however, this was not judgement; it was failure to rule. That was more obvious at some times than at others. Henry’s ‘decision’, for example, to grant the stewardship of his duchy of Cornwall twice over to two lords who were bitter local rivals could hardly be mistaken for considered policy, resulting as it did in the ravages of a private war. But the results of his passive malleability were most perniciously evident on a bigger stage than the increasingly disordered English regions: the monumental theatre of war with France.

While Henry was a child, his nobles had worked together to preserve his father’s conquests, their unity of purpose underpinned both by the strength of the English military machine during the 1420s and by the obvious need for collective rule during the king’s long minority. It was with some relief that the lords had sought at last to hand over the reins of government when Henry approached adulthood, and precedent encouraged them to assume that he would be waiting impatiently to seize them from their grasp. Instead, to their puzzled consternation, they found the reins dangling limply in his fingers. If a matter hung on the king’s personal initiative, nothing happened; if it depended on the petition of an interested party – as was often the case with grants of royal office and revenue – then royal policy lurched indiscriminately, pulled this way and that according to the demands of the latest petitioner to secure access to the apparently infinitely pliable king.

Clearly, he was too ‘young’ to rule without wise advice. (‘A saint’, wrote his hagiographer; ‘a natural fool’, his subjects muttered in their cups.) Into the breach had stepped the earl of Suffolk. As steward of the king’s household, he could hope to shield the king from the more haphazardly importunate of his subjects, and as a great noble and member of the royal council, he might be able to maintain enough of a consensus among the magnates to keep the ship of state on its course. The war in France had dominated Suffolk’s entire life. His father and brother had died fighting under Henry V’s command, his father at the siege of Harfleur and his brother as one of the few English casualties at Agincourt. Suffolk himself had fought in France for thirteen years, during which time he had been captured and forced to pay a crippling ransom to secure his freedom; and his wife Alice was the widow of his former commander, the earl of Salisbury, who had been killed by a rogue artillery blast at the siege of Orléans. Suffolk, if anyone, understood by 1445 that, in the absence of a warrior king, a lasting peace was the only way to secure England’s possession of Normandy.

What was less clear was how peace should be achieved. The treaty that brought Margaret to England had bought time to
consider that question – but not much. By 1445 it was obvious that the French would have to be offered some concrete concession if they were to be induced to come to terms. So, behind closed doors, Suffolk and his colleagues brokered a deal: England would cede to France the county of Maine – which lay between English-held Normandy and French Anjou, and was still, precariously, under English control – in return for a twenty-year extension of the truce. It was not perfect, but it would have to do; and it had the manifest advantages of allowing England time to secure Normandy’s borders while at the same time refilling royal coffers that had been emptied by thirty years of constant warfare.