She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (50 page)

And observers were in no doubt of who was leading the opposition to the duke’s rule. ‘The resumption, men trust, shall forth, if my lord of York’s first power of protectorship stand, and else not, etc.,’ wrote John Bocking, a servant of the wealthy Norfolk knight Sir John Fastolf, to his master in early February 1456. ‘The queen is a great and strong laboured woman, for she spares no pain to sue her things to an intent and conclusion to her power.’ Bocking did not explicitly articulate the link between these two observations, but in such tense times his letter – which might, one never knew, fall into unfriendly hands between London and East Anglia – was already remarkably outspoken. Margaret was not only resisting the implementation of the act of resumption in her own right, but offering her leadership to others at court whose interests were not served by York and his proposals – Bocking’s phrase ‘strong laboured’ meaning ‘much solicited’ by those around her.

In other words, having once failed to secure a formal appointment as her husband’s regent, Margaret – who was never less than resourceful – had now decided that she already wielded enough authority to take action against the threat that York represented. Her husband wore the crown, and her two-year-old son would do so in future. If both temporarily needed her help in defending their rights – Edward because he was a baby, and Henry because he was scarcely more capable than his son – then she, as Henry’s anointed queen, was ready and willing to shoulder the burden. Her success in championing resistance to York’s agenda was already evident by 25 February, just a fortnight after Bocking’s letter, when the duke, faced with rapidly disintegrating support among the nobility for his fledgling regime, resigned as protector. The immediate result was a fraught political impasse: while York did not have enough authority to maintain formal command of Henry’s government, neither did anyone else have enough authority to supplant him.

Margaret’s work, however, had only just begun. Two months after York’s resignation, she left London for her castle at Tutbury in Staffordshire, taking her young son with her. But this was no retreat from the forefront of politics. Instead, Margaret was redrafting the rules of engagement. With a regency out of the question, she could acquire no formal stake in council sessions at Westminster; but government rested too – in the absence of a standing army or professionalised police force under the direct control of the crown – on the practicalities of landed power, and it was these that Margaret now sought to harness for the first time. As she did so, no one could mistake the intensity of purpose or the focused aggression with which her husband’s authority would now be defended.

 

Margaret’s fortress of Tutbury belonged to the duchy of Lancaster, which had been the greatest noble estate in the country until 1399 when its owner, Henry’s grandfather, swapped his ducal coronet for the royal crown as King Henry IV. Among the uses to which the Lancastrian kings had put their private estates since then had been the endowment of their queens, and as a result Margaret now held great swathes of the duchy of Lancaster’s lands in the midlands and the north. Together with the estates held by her son as earl of Chester and prince of Wales, the queen could potentially call on the financial and military resources of a substantial territorial power base with its centre of gravity in the north midlands and the north-west. If the duke of York chose to use his landed power to overawe his peers and impose his will on government, then he might now find that others could do the same.

That, at least, was the implication of the tension-filled stalemate that held during the long hot weeks of the summer of 1456, with the principal protagonists of English politics scattered around the kingdom like pieces on a chessboard. The duke of York had retreated to his impregnable castle at Sandal in west Yorkshire, and the earl of Warwick to his fortress at Warwick, while Margaret and her son stayed first at Tutbury and then rode north-west to the prince’s castle at Chester. King Henry, meanwhile, tended by the members of his household, moved between the city of London and the neighbouring royal palaces of Westminster and Sheen while a council of lords attempted to maintain government in his name, as John Bocking reported in June. But it was clear where the fulcrum of power now lay: ‘My lord of York is at Sandal still, and waits on the queen, and she upon him.’

And by the end of the summer the balance was tipping in Margaret’s direction. In late August it was decided – tacitly, but implicitly, at the queen’s suggestion – that Henry should join her and their son in the midlands. The king, escorted by his household entourage, arrived in early September at Coventry, the greatest city among the prince’s estates, which lay only a few miles from the queen’s own imposing castle at Kenilworth in Warwickshire. On 14 September, his wife and son came to Coventry to meet him – and there was no mistaking, from the carefully planned pageants with which their triumphal entry into the city was greeted, what Margaret intended her husband’s subjects to understand: that royal authority was now vested in the triumvirate of king, queen and prince, with herself at its centre.

Prophets and evangelists, with St Edward the Confessor in their midst in a gown of the royallest stuff the city guilds could provide, crowded onto the stage to compare Margaret to the queen of heaven (‘Like as mankind was gladded by the birth of Jesus, so shall this empire joy the birth of your body …’). But it was a model of more than queenly motherhood that this august assemblage of theatrical personages had gathered to provide. The four Cardinal Virtues – Righteousness, Temperance, Strength and Prudence, the chief qualities of rightful kingship – now pledged their counsel to Margaret in the laborious metre of hastily composed civic verse, and the Nine Worthies then stepped forward to promise her their service (‘princess most royal, as to the highest lady that I can imagine’), before the queen’s namesake, St Margaret, took centre stage to slay a dragon in triumphantly heroic style.

Initially at least, the omens, as well as the oratory, seemed promising. At the end of the first week in October a great council gathered in the city. All the leading magnates had been summoned to attend, and most of them complied, including, with some unease, the duke of York. Most of the nobles still, and with increasing desperation, hoped to find an escape from the horrors of civil war to some form of stability; perhaps the queen’s presentation of the royal family as a vehicle for her husband’s authority might offer a
means to pull back from the precipice that St Albans had opened up before them. They therefore agreed to the appointment of a new set of officers of state, men who gave Margaret much greater influence over the administration of her husband’s government, but were simultaneously acceptable to the majority of his lords. The queen’s own chancellor, Laurence Booth, became keeper of the privy seal; the earl of Shrewsbury, son of the ‘English Achilles’ who had died at Castillon, became treasurer of England; and the king’s confessor William Wainfleet, the scholarly and conscientious bishop of Winchester, became chancellor.

All the same, the lords would not comply with any attempt to pursue the partisan division that had been so bloodily apparent at St Albans. If, in Margaret’s eyes, the duke of York’s actions that day had proved beyond doubt that he was a traitor, it was not a conclusion that the duke’s peers were yet prepared to endorse. The duke was required to swear a public oath declaring his loyalty and obedience, but no further action was taken against him; and when he left Coventry he was said to be ‘in right good conceit with the king’ – Henry’s benevolence being, as always, indiscriminate – ‘but not in great conceit with the queen’, an associate of John Bocking reported.

Nevertheless, the practical possibilities afforded to Margaret by her new influence over the machinery of government quickly became apparent in the early months of 1457. At the end of January a formal council was appointed to oversee her three-year-old son’s affairs, along with new officials for his household and the administration of his estates. The prince’s council included Laurence Booth, the new keeper of the privy seal; Booth’s predecessor as Margaret’s chancellor, his half-brother William, archbishop of York; the new treasurer, the earl of Shrewsbury; and Margaret’s chief steward, John, Viscount Beaumont – all of whom were to act as councillors (the patent endorsed in Henry’s name declared) ‘with the approval and agreement of our best-beloved consort the queen’. Beaumont was also appointed steward of the prince’s lands, while two gentlemen of the king’s household, both of them
married to ladies-in-waiting in Margaret’s own establishment, took over the management of young Edward’s finances as his receiver-general and keeper of his great wardrobe.

Piece by piece, Margaret was building a political network that extended her reach within government while reinforcing the territorial power at her disposal through her own and her son’s estates. She was making such strides, it seemed, in creating a composite authority to serve as a substitute for her vacuous husband that, when she left Coventry after a second great council meeting that spring, her horse was preceded by the mayor and sheriffs of the city carrying their insignia of office ‘like as they before time did before the king’, the mayor’s register noted with some surprise: ‘and so they did never before the queen till then, for they bore before that time always their servants’ maces before the queen’.

Margaret might ride with all the trappings of majesty, but there were also signs that the efficacy of her new authority would still be limited. The duke of York would not simply bow before the queen’s influence, as became clear when he refused to attend the second council held at Coventry in March 1457 – and for good reason, given that the queen would not accept the need to conciliate a nobleman who had ridden in arms against her husband and might pose a threat to the inheritance of her son. The difficulty for Margaret, meanwhile, was that the unique authority of her husband’s crown relied on his ability to provide universal law and representative justice to all of his subjects. If she were now to construct a new form of royal government intended not only to exclude but to destroy the greatest magnate in the country, then she ran the risk that she might undermine the power of the crown itself.

It is not clear, however, that Margaret fully understood the pitfalls of the position she was taking up with such drive and determination. At twenty-six, she was revealing herself to be a political force of relentless energy and unbending will, but she showed less obvious sign of either the tactical shrewdness of her countrywoman Isabella or the fierce intelligence of their mutual ancestor Eleanor. Moreover, her political education had been conducted in
France, where kings had acquired their sovereign power by a gradual, attritional process of subjugating great noble domains to the force of their authority (the English-held duchies of Normandy and Aquitaine among them). For Margaret, therefore, steeped as she was in the political traditions of a different kingdom’s history, it made perfect sense that the crown might be required to crush an ‘overmighty’ subject – a perspective which served to obscure the fact that, in England, the crown itself might be fatally compromised in the attempt.

But, if there were missteps along the political path she had chosen, it also had to be said that there was quicksand shifting dangerously beneath her feet. The very circumstance that enabled her to act – the fact that she was the king’s wife – simultaneously undermined her actions. The more she asserted herself in Henry’s stead, the more he appeared an emasculated puppet, his authority ebbing away; and as the reserves of legitimacy on which she could draw gradually diminished, the queen herself became the subject of whispered caricature and contempt.

It was hardly surprising, perhaps, that when her son had been born ‘people spoke strangely’, as one London chronicler reported. After eight childless years of marriage to an unworldly naïf, Margaret’s safe delivery of an heir to the throne had been as unexpected as it was convenient. Now, however, more elaborate rumours began to circulate. Little Edward was not the queen’s son, some said; others that he was not the king’s, or that he had been ‘changed in the cradle’ and was related by blood to neither king nor queen. Gossip about royal changelings was nothing new (as Edward II had discovered), and the fact that the duke of York had been heir presumptive to Henry’s throne before the baby’s birth made the young prince an obvious focus for scurrilous speculation among those who sympathised with York’s political agenda.

But the language of illegitimacy carried a particular burden of significance amid the power play of 1457. Margaret’s political leadership was predicated on her role as wife to the king and mother to his heir – but loyal wives did not customarily supplant their
husbands at the head of government. The implication was that unnatural impulses were at work, both inside and outside the royal bedchamber. Margaret might seek to associate herself with the virtuous queen of heaven in her attempt to rule through a royal trinity of king, queen and prince, but the evident fact that she was the prime mover of the three threatened to wreck the whole enterprise on the rocks of her aberrant behaviour as a wife and a woman.