She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (48 page)

When the dreadful news reached England at the beginning of August, military disaster precipitated political cataclysm. King Henry’s always fragile mental faculties suddenly disintegrated. He was ‘taken and smitten with a frenzy and his wit and reason withdrawn’, one contemporary account records with palpable shock. Wit and reason had never been among Henry’s most notable attributes, but the newly stark totality of their absence could not now be disguised as the king sat blank and unresponsive, recognising no one, understanding nothing, unable to speak, or even to eat or move without the ministrations of the servants who attended him day and night.

This was not the first time in Henry’s reign that he had been incapable of any kind of communication; he had, after all, inherited his throne as a nine-month-old baby. But that incapacity had been both explicable and explicitly temporary. This was different, and it was frightening. Who should – who could? – rule when the king was lost in a catatonic stupor, whether permanently or not no one knew, with the realm reeling from military defeat and a nobility divided against itself?

The answer was no clearer ten weeks into the king’s illness, when Margaret gave birth on 13 October, the feast day of Edward the Confessor, to a healthy boy who was named Edward in the royal saint’s honour. Her husband’s pitiful state rendered him oblivious to the arrival of his son, just as he was to everything else. But Margaret had good reason to feel elated. Amid chaos and crisis, she had fulfilled her principal duty as England’s queen. She had given the realm an heir, a hope for the future and an anchor amid its present sea of troubles.

She had also presented herself with a dilemma. The infant she held in her arms gave her – as Isabella had discovered before her – a direct stake in the power play that surrounded her. What she had to decide now was how far she would go in using it.

 

This was the moment at which Margaret took her first step out of her husband’s diminishing shadow to stand on the political stage as a player in her own right, acting under her own independent agency – but the surviving contemporary sources allow us only fragmentary glimpses of her as she did so.

The great tradition of annalistic writing in England – of monastic authors recording the unfolding of God’s purpose in the world as it happened, year by year – was stuttering and faltering, to be supplanted eventually, as the fifteenth century gave way to the sixteenth, by the great political propagandists, writing history retrospectively to record the unfolding of God’s purpose as their present political masters wished it to be seen. Their depiction of Margaret is so powerful – culminating with lacerating virtuosity in Shakespeare’s portrait of the ‘She-wolf of France’ – that it has become almost impossible not to see her through the wrong end of the historical telescope.

Such contemporaneous evidence as we have, however, offers less caricature and more complexity. What is certain is that Margaret’s response to her husband’s prostration and her son’s birth was an immediate decision to advance her own claim to exercise authority on their behalf. In January 1454, when her son was just three months old, a well-informed observer in London reported that ‘the queen has made a bill of five articles, desiring those articles to be granted; whereof the first is that she desires to have the whole rule of this land’ – including, the letter went on, the right to appoint ‘the chancellor, the treasurer, the privy seal, and all other officers of this land, with sheriffs and all other officers that the king should make’, together with the power to ‘give all the bishoprics of this
land, and all other benefices belonging to the king’s gift’.

This was a dramatic piece of self-assertion – and one which caused political shockwaves. Immediate precedent in England offered no support for Margaret’s claims to power, since King Henry’s mother, Catherine de Valois, had taken no part in the minority government set up to rule during the long years of his childhood. Instead, Queen Catherine had been content to retire from political life after her husband’s early death, entertaining herself first by dallying behind closed doors with Edmund Beaufort – then a dashing nineteen-year-old, now the middle-aged duke of Somerset – and later by marrying an equally gallant but much more obscure Welsh squire named Owen Tudor.

In part, the fact that Margaret was seeking to tread a different path from her royal mother-in-law undoubtedly reflected the difference in the two women’s temperaments. Catherine was wilful, wayward and highly strung; it was through her that the unhappy genetic legacy of her father’s mental frailty had been passed on to her son. It was just becoming apparent, meanwhile, that Margaret had inherited the determination and political commitment of the formidable mother and grandmother who had brought her up.

But it was not simply Margaret’s character that impelled her to try to take the reins of government. In 1422 the accession of an infant king had been dramatic, but uncontroversial. Without hesitation, all his nobles had united to defend his father’s extraordinary military achievements in France and to maintain the security of his English kingdom until Henry should come of age – a task for which Queen Catherine, the sister of Henry’s rival for the French throne, was clearly unsuited. In 1453, however, there was no such consensus, and no such clarity. The suppurating damage to the body politic caused by the long-term inadequacies of Henry’s rule and the consequent rivalry between the dukes of York and Somerset was laid open to public view by the king’s dramatic collapse. The question of who should rule while Henry was incapacitated was so fraught with tension that civil war seemed not only a real but an imminent possibility.

The duke of York – claiming still to speak for the realm as the greatest of its magnates – arrived in London in November to assert his right to govern on the king’s behalf. Now that Henry’s catastrophic indisposition could not be concealed, this was a difficult claim to resist. Within weeks, as York took control of the royal council, the duke of Somerset was arrested and committed to the Tower on the grounds of his allegedly treasonable involvement in the loss of France. His imprisonment did not, however, render him politically impotent: his spies were reported to have infiltrated ‘every lord’s house’, and his men were occupying all available lodgings in the streets around the Tower. The rest of the nobility, meanwhile, were gathering arms and men – ‘all the puissance they can and may’ – for the kind of self-protection that might precipitate the collapse into chaos of the entire edifice of government.

In this atmosphere of fear and tension, Margaret’s attempt to insist that she should have ‘the whole rule of this land’ need not necessarily be seen as the claim of a damagingly over-assertive woman. She had only to look to her own political education in her native France for the suggestion that she was the obvious candidate to safeguard her husband’s kingdom. Positive precedent existed on the southern side of the Channel: Blanca of Castile, the little granddaughter whom Eleanor of Aquitaine had chosen as the bride of Louis VIII of France, had acquitted herself with distinction as regent during the minority of her son Louis IX, and again for the last four years of her life during his later absence on crusade. And this process by which royal women might serve as deputies for their men had been echoed closer to Margaret’s home in the commanding roles her mother and grandmother had taken in Anjou and Naples in the absence of her imprisoned father. No doubt the clarity with which women were now excluded from the line of royal succession in France served to simplify this acceptance of female power in a form that was explicitly provisional and temporary, but the idea that an anointed queen – consort to a king, and an embodiment of some of the more restorative and collaborative elements of his God-given authority – might, in time of
need, wield power on his behalf had political logic to commend it in an English context too.

But the potentialities of political logic were overwhelmed by the particularities of the political nightmare in which Margaret and her husband’s increasingly unnerved subjects found themselves at the end of 1453. She, of course, was not simply a queen but a Frenchwoman, at a time when England – newly redefined in its Englishness by the loss of all its territories in France save the port of Calais – was reeling from a bloody battering at the hands of its French enemies. The birth of her son had rooted her as never before in the political landscape of her husband’s kingdom, but the short weeks of his young life had not yet been enough to allow her new persona as an English queen mother to grow to fruition.

Even had her French heritage not made her an object of suspicion, it also had to be said that the very concept of a formal regency was foreign to the recent course of English history. During Henry’s childhood, when the authority of the crown could not be exercised by the king in person, government had been conducted instead through the collective responsibility of a noble council under the nominal leadership of the king’s uncle, Henry V’s youngest brother Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, whose official title as ‘protector, defender and principal councillor’ of England notably omitted any suggestion that he might act independently as a regent on behalf of his nephew. And two generations earlier, suspicion about the repercussions of committing authority into the hands of a single powerful individual had similarly circumscribed the formal role of the great John of Gaunt in the minority government of his nephew Richard II.

For Margaret, these already prohibitive circumstances were compounded in 1453 by the fact that the nature of her husband’s illness made it difficult for her to obtain any significant hold on the exercise of legitimate royal authority in his stead. In an earlier century, Eleanor of Aquitaine had enjoyed wide-ranging informal powers during her son Richard’s absence from England when he was detained elsewhere by the demands of crusade and the bars of
a German jail. Isabella of France, meanwhile, had demonstrated a queen’s capacity to embody the legitimating power of royal justice and the common good against a king fatally compromised by his own tyranny.

But Henry was not physically absent, nor was he a tyrant. He had never overstepped his powers; instead, he had never properly inhabited them. Margaret’s ability to take decisive action was therefore compromised by the fact that her husband was both present and blameless: he had not done anything wrong, even if it was by dint of having not done anything at all. Henry was – technically, at least – an adult, and it was from his supreme authority as king that she derived her complementary capacity as his queen. If she stepped forward into the breach left by his hapless inertia, the identification between her authority and his would serve only to emphasise the ‘unnaturalness’ – and hence illegitimacy – of her self-assertion.

As a result, the one thing on which Henry’s nobles could agree, amid this threatening uncertainty, was that the queen’s offer to rule over them should be respectfully but firmly declined. Instead, an alternative model – collective noble responsibility for the interests of the realm, the principle that had sustained government during the long years of Henry’s childhood – offered both precedent and means by which royal rule could be temporarily approximated. In March 1454 a deputation of lords rode to Windsor and confirmed yet again that, despite three attempts using ‘all the means and ways that they could think’, they could extract ‘no answer, word nor sign’ from their pitifully blank-eyed king. In the absence of any indication that he might imminently recover, it was decided that the best of a handful of bad options would be to allow the duke of York – who, like Humphrey of Gloucester before him, could claim to be the closest adult male in the line of succession – to lead the newly reconstituted conciliar regime as protector of the realm. And, two weeks before York was formally named to that office, Margaret’s five-month-old son was created prince of Wales and earl of Chester – a public confirmation of the
baby’s rights as heir to the throne that served (it seemed from her silent acquiescence, in public at least) to reassure the queen of the regime’s loyalty.

York wasted no time in setting about the business of government. At forty-three, encumbered with a chequered political past in this most chequered of political environments, he showed substantial maturity of judgement in realising that power won on the grounds of a claim to speak for the ‘common weal’ of the realm would have to be exercised in explicitly impartial, non-partisan fashion. The protracted strain that Henry’s failings had placed on political life at all levels of the political hierarchy was manifesting itself in spiralling disorder across the country. In the north of England in particular, violent rivalry between the two greatest noble families, the Percys and the Nevilles, had all but become a private war. Here York shouldered his newly acquired powers with the utmost seriousness of purpose, working hard on the one hand as a collaborative colleague among his peers in the council chamber, and on the other as the champion of order when, steel in hand, he rode at the head of his troops to quell resistance and recalcitrance in the regions. There was no wholesale purge of the royal household, and those lords who were politically close to the duke soon learned that they could not expect his indiscriminate support in their private vendettas.