She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (47 page)

Behind closed doors too, Margaret lent her voice to the negotiations through which this deal was concluded. The making of peace between her own country and her husband’s was after all, as the city of London’s pageants had so ponderously emphasised, her
raison d être
as England’s queen. She had no direct role in the shaping of policy; but the idea that Maine should be a bridge between her husband’s lands in Normandy and her father’s in Anjou, its surrender into French hands bringing advantage to both sides, cannot have been unwelcome to her. And so she did what she could, as a dutiful queen should, to facilitate an understanding between her adopted home and the kingdom of her birth.

There were profound tensions in this role, tensions evident even in the diplomatic language in which her intercession was couched. When she wrote to her ‘very dear uncle of France’ to solicit his ‘good disposition and inclination … for the good of this peace’, she did so using her formal title as ‘queen of France and England’ – words which provocatively encapsulated the essence of the conflict she was trying to end. But there was at least hope that the truce for which she and Suffolk were working so assiduously would serve to mitigate the potentially disastrous effects of her husband’s inability to command his own kingdom.

That hope did not last. The difficulty of enforcing a single, clear policy in the name of an inert king meant that the truce was followed by no effective retrenchment in Normandy’s defences, while
at the same time the English forces occupying Maine refused to obey the order to surrender it into French hands. Charles VII was already well aware that military as well as diplomatic cards were stacked high in his favour, and this English failure to abide by the terms of a treaty they had been so desperate to secure gave him legitimate reason to sweep the agreement aside. In February 1448 his armies marched into Maine to take by force what the English had promised him. The county was his within weeks; and in the summer of 1449 Charles turned his attentions to Normandy. It took only two months for Rouen, the capital of English government in France, to fall. The English retreat became a rout, and by the summer of 1450 not a foot of land in Normandy remained in English hands to show that Henry V’s spectacular conquests had ever taken place.

As this disaster unfolded, across the Channel the news was met with first disbelief, then horror, then finally vitriolic recrimination. A scapegoat was needed: after all, only evil counsel whispered into the ear of the innocent king could have engendered such a catastrophe. While the rest of the nobles backed away as surreptitiously as they could from any suggestion that they had played a part in formulating the failed treaty, Suffolk stood alone, unable to explain away his leading role in its inception. As recently as June 1448 he had been promoted to the rank of duke as reward for his loyal service to the king. Now, on 22 January 1450, he stood before Henry and the lords in parliament to answer for his treason.

This gifted man defended himself with passion and wit, but he was unable to find shelter from the storm which the loss of Normandy had unleashed. In March 1450 he formally submitted to the king’s grace and accepted a sentence of five years’ banishment from England. For his accusers in parliament, this compromise neatly avoided the risk that a full trial would expose the inconvenient truth that Suffolk had not, in fact, acted alone. But for the king’s subjects beyond parliament’s walls – furious that thousands of pounds in taxation had been drained from their pockets to pay for a protracted military fiasco – Suffolk’s exile was not enough.

The rage of the mob had already claimed the life of another of Henry’s ministers, the bishop of Chichester, who had been butchered by mutinous soldiers in Portsmouth a few months earlier. Suffolk was still unscathed when he set sail across the Channel at the end of April, and believed that he had escaped the worst; but his small ship was intercepted by another, a privateering vessel named the
Nicholas of the Tower
. Its crew staged a mock trial on the deck, declaring that ‘as the king did not wish to punish these traitors of his own will, nor to govern the aforesaid realm better, they themselves would do it’. Then they hacked off the duke’s head with a rusty sword, and abandoned his mutilated corpse on the sand at Dover.

It was the beginning of a bloody summer. King, queen and nobles had gathered for a parliament at Leicester when news came of Suffolk’s shocking death, and it was less than a month later that more messengers arrived, breathless and sweating in the heat, to report that Henry’s discredited government was under attack. Across south-eastern England, thousands of his subjects were rising in revolt, spontaneous protest becoming concerted insurrection under the charismatic leadership of a Kentishman known as Jack Cade. Margaret found herself travelling south amid a tense and armed convoy as her hapless husband rode to his capital, accompanied by an imposing company of his magnates, to issue his royal command that the rebels should disperse. And she was at his side when he retreated back to the safety of his castle at Kenilworth two weeks later, having utterly failed in his purpose.

The rebels swarmed to the south bank of the Thames, and then across London Bridge into the city itself, rallying support as they went with a manifesto that railed against the ‘false counsel’ that had brought King Henry’s realm to the brink of ruin: ‘for his lands are lost, his merchandise is lost, his commons destroyed, the sea is lost, France is lost, himself so poor that he may not pay for his meat nor drink’. It was a powerful message, and one that spoke eloquently to the inhabitants of a region that now looked with dread toward the coast, where the triumphant French were seizing their new-found opportunity to raid and plunder with impunity.

But it was the rebels’ own violence that proved their undoing. Though Cade held his own judicial hearings in the capital, seeking to demonstrate the legitimacy of his cause, the courtiers and royal officials convicted there who were unlucky enough to fall into the rebels’ hands were slaughtered, their severed heads paraded on pikes to the delight of the mob, while houses and workshops were looted and burned. Sympathetic though the Londoners might be to the rebels’ demands for reform, they would not stand by while their great city was destroyed. On the night of 5 July, a battle was fought on London Bridge between Cade’s men, who were expecting to move freely between the city and their commandeered lodgings across the Thames in Southwark, and a cadre of Londoners and loyalists grimly determined to keep them out. After hours of fighting, with death everywhere at hand by water, fire and sharpened steel, the sun rose on a scene not only of devastation, but of resolution. The revolt was over.

Margaret had a role to play in the long process of restoring order to the chaos-ravaged south-east, since the royal pardon dangled as a carrot to induce the rebels to disperse was offered – as was traditional – ‘by the most humble and persistent supplications, prayers and requests of our most serene and beloved wife and consort the queen’. Not that the pardon was enough to save Cade, who died from the injuries he suffered during his eventual arrest on 12 July. This inconvenient demise did not prevent the authorities from inflicting the proper penalties on such an egregious traitor: his naked corpse was publicly beheaded outside Newgate prison four days later, and his head then left to rot on a spike overlooking London Bridge, while the pieces of his quartered body were despatched for macabre display on city walls around the country.

‘Normality’ had returned. The king’s authority was once more unchallenged; its justice was properly tempered by his queen’s mercy; and traitors – as Cade’s decomposing skull reminded those Londoners who raised their eyes to see it – would meet their just deserts. Still, all was not quite as it should be. The shock of revolt
had done nothing to jolt the almost thirty-year-old king into any more active engagement with his responsibilities. The duke of Suffolk had been taken from his side, but that merely left a vacancy – and one for which there were now, alarmingly, competing candidates. Two of Henry’s cousins began to assert their claims to lead his government, and the conflict between them exposed more explicitly than ever the fact that the mild-mannered king was incapable of ruling for himself.

Richard Plantagenet, duke of York, was by birth and by inheritance the greatest of Henry’s magnates. Directly descended in the male line from Edward III, he was the lord of estates that sprawled across England and Wales, and the confidence that this greatness gave him in speaking for the realm was compounded in the specific circumstances of 1450 by the fact that he had left the country in the summer of the previous year to take up an appointment as the king’s lieutenant in Ireland. Put simply, responsibility for catastrophe in France and convulsions in England could not be pinned on him because he had not been there when they took place. And the way was therefore clear for him to adopt the people’s call for justice, denouncing the ‘evil counsel’ that had led England to disaster, and identifying the remedy for the country’s ills in the true counsel of the blood royal, as embodied in himself, rather than in the corruption and self-interest of the court.

Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, meanwhile, was also directly descended in the male line from Edward III (albeit via the controversial marriage of Henry’s great-grandfather John of Gaunt to his mistress Katherine Swynford, by which their children, the Beauforts, were retrospectively legitimised). This narrow escape from the wrong side of the blanket meant that Beaufort influence was based not on any vast ancestral inheritance but on their proximity of blood to the ruling Lancastrian line and their presence at the Lancastrian court. By contrast with York, Somerset could not have been more intimately involved in the loss of France; he had been the commander who had experienced the
abject humiliation of surrendering Rouen in return for a French safe-conduct as English-held Normandy collapsed around him. But he had therefore also been a key agent of policy formulated in the king’s name throughout the 1440s, and in 1450 he stepped unhesitatingly into the breach to offer leadership against the turmoil that rebellion was unleashing across the country.

It was this closeness to Henry – personal, physical and political – that enabled Somerset to win the battle for control of government as 1450 turned into 1451. Devastating though York’s criticisms of ‘court’ policy might be (and however much they drew a convenient veil over his own role in the regime before 1449), the intractable fact remained that this ‘good duke’ was not the king. And the king – vague, benign and blameless – remained the only source of legitimate royal authority. Gradually, then, Somerset pieced back together the kind of consensus among the lords and control of the king’s household that had allowed Suffolk to rule before him. But this time York’s estrangement from the inner circle of noble counsellors and his explicit criticism of the regime rendered Henry’s government more brittle than ever before.

Henry’s queen, too, found her place at his side suddenly more uncomfortable than it had been since her arrival in England five years earlier. England’s possessions in France were now reduced to two unsteady footholds, one the port of Calais in northern Picardy, the other the tattered remnants in south-western Gascony of the once great duchy of Aquitaine. The peace Margaret had embodied was a distant, devastated memory. For her English subjects, the land of her birth was now a mockingly triumphant enemy, and she had no child to bind her to her new nation. Nor, it appeared, was there any prospect of one. The king and queen were a devoted couple: he, modest and monkish as he was, showed no sign of turning his attentions elsewhere, and she took care to design her life around his, her household travelling with his between the royal palaces at Westminster, Windsor, Sheen, Greenwich and Eltham. Despite this constant company, by Christmas 1452 the
twenty-two-year-old queen had not yet conceived after seven years of married life.

But the early months of 1453 offered new grounds for optimism, both for Margaret and for her adopted country. The duke of York had been forced to withdraw to his estates after a dangerously tense confrontation with royal forces under the command of the duke of Somerset at Dartford in 1452. Somerset was now consolidating his control of government by despatching Henry on a judicial progress around his troubled realm, a display of royal authority that went some way toward calming the jittery nerves of his subjects. News was beginning to filter through that a military expedition sent to Gascony under the command of the earl of Shrewsbury – a grizzled hero of earlier campaigns in France, known admiringly as the ‘English Achilles’ – was finding unexpected success not only in defending the English position there but in recapturing lost territory, including the rich and strategically crucial port of Bordeaux. When parliament met at Reading in March 1453 there was an unfamiliar outpouring of both enthusiasm for Henry’s rule and taxes for his treasury. And by then, Margaret knew that she was pregnant.

God seemed, at last, to be smiling on a beleaguered queen and a beleaguered country. In April sunshine, she travelled – carefully, given the early stage of her pregnancy – to Norfolk to give thanks at Walsingham’s famous shrine to the Virgin Mary. Her fellow pilgrims looked on in awe and excitement as a queen took her place in their midst to pay her respects at the Holy House, a replica of the home in Nazareth where the queen of heaven had first heard the news of her own miraculous pregnancy from the Archangel Gabriel, and to venerate relics that included a phial of the Virgin’s breastmilk. Margaret bestowed on the shrine a gift of a pax – a gold tablet worked with the image of an angel and encrusted with sapphires, rubies and pearls, for use during mass – to express her gratitude for the child she was now carrying.

Her gift was apparently rich enough to secure the future of her baby, since her pregnancy continued without incident in the summer’s
heat, and her health remained reassuringly robust. But in all other respects God’s favour proved agonisingly transient. On 17 July 1453 the English forces in Gascony, who had done so much to revive the political as well as military prospects of Henry’s government, met a French army at Castillon, twenty-five miles east of Bordeaux. Within hours they had been overwhelmed. Their talismanic commander, the sixty-six-year-old earl of Shrewsbury, was killed, along with thousands of his men, and, almost exactly three hundred years after Eleanor of Aquitaine had first brought her duchy to the English crown, Gascony was lost.