She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (51 page)

Despite the strides she had made in building a power base at Coventry, the constraints on her ability to rule were publicly exposed at the end of August 1457 by the threat of a French invasion. Danger to the realm required the most authoritative response possible, and that, it became clear, was not the command of the queen. Instead, when king, queen and lords converged on Westminster, the traditional seat of government, the nobles moved once again to convene a council under Henry’s benignly vacant purview. The magnates who were charged by this council with mustering sailors, soldiers and archers to defend the south coast and the Scottish border included York and the Nevilles, as well as the lords who enjoyed Margaret’s trust and those still trying to steer a course between them. And, once this collective mobilisation had seen off the imminent menace of a French military offensive, an attempt was made to use the same principle of united action to secure internal as well as external peace.

Under the auspices of this council – a fragile simulacrum of the conciliar regimes that had safeguarded England during Henry’s childhood and illness – a ‘loveday’ was proposed as a means of settling the conflict within the realm. The holding of a loveday was a familiar element within the grammar of local disputes – a ceremony to enact an arbitrated settlement based on the principles of restorative justice, rather than the winner-takes-all approach of the law courts. Such appeals to mutual interest through mutual concession played a vital part in containing hostilities within local communities. Could the same process now protect the community of the whole realm?

It was a risky business. At the end of January 1458, the lords began to assemble at their lodgings in London, ready to make peace but prepared – just in case – for war, each with hundreds of armed men wearing their badges and liveries. Amid the confined spaces of the city and its suburbs, in an atmosphere that crackled and jumped with tension, friction between these rival bands of soldiers threatened to spark a political conflagration. The mayor and sheriffs nervously set their sentries to watch round the clock, despatched patrols to walk the main arteries of the city, and outlawed the carrying of weapons inside the gates of the capital.

And well they might. The duke of York had taken up residence within the graceful walls of Baynard’s Castle, his London residence, which nestled near Blackfriars Quay at the south-west corner of the city where the Fleet river gave into the Thames, while the young duke of Somerset, who had been wounded at St Albans at his dying father’s side when he was just nineteen, had found lodgings beyond Ludgate, where Fleet Street and the Strand led westward to the king’s palace at Westminster. The Neville earls, Salisbury and Warwick, were, with York, at their townhouses inside the city; the new earl of Northumberland with the duke of Somerset outside London’s walls. Those who were charged by the council to forge a peace among the lords therefore had to move uncomfortably between what amounted to two armed encampments, within and without the city gates, and amid swirling rumours of ambushes and plots, a dangerous confrontation between the hot-headed duke of Somerset and the brash earl of Warwick was only narrowly avoided.

By the middle of March, however, a settlement had been hammered out under the watchful eye of the archbishop of Canterbury. York and the Nevilles were to pay some notional financial compensation and offer masses for the souls of the lords killed at St Albans; in return, they were to be recognised, along with those who had died, as the king’s loyal subjects. The loveday itself, which would give ceremonial force to this reconciliation, was set for 25 March. That morning the crowds began to gather early, lining
the streets that led to the great cathedral of St Paul’s, its soaring spire reaching into the spring sky. They were rewarded with an extraordinary sight.

A stately procession made its way through Ludgate towards the cathedral, its participants glittering with gems and cloth of gold rather than the flashes of steel that had caused such alarm on London’s streets for weeks beforehand. At its head came the youthful figure of the duke of Somerset, his gloved hand reluctantly clasped in that of Richard Neville, the earl of Salisbury. Next walked Salisbury’s son, the earl of Warwick, gripping the fingers of Henry Holland, duke of Exeter, a close ally of Somerset and the Percy earl of Northumberland, and most recently Warwick’s bitter rival for the captaincy of Calais. Then came King Henry in solitary majesty, his face beneath the heavy golden crown almost as full of wonderment as those of his subjects who had come to watch this unlikely spectacle. And behind the king, most improbable of all, came the stern-faced duke of York, hand in hand with Henry’s queen.

For Margaret, it seemed, this was a moment to savour. Here, on Lady Day – the feast of the queen of heaven – the power of the queen of England was given full recognition. Under her aegis, the duke of York and his allies had been brought to admit culpability for the bloodshed at St Albans. No formal role had been available to her, as the king’s wife, in the negotiations that preceded the loveday or the documents in which the settlement was inscribed, other than the traditional one of intercessor in the cause of peace. The final text of the concord painted an utterly conventional picture of a king moved to mercy by ‘the great request, cordial desire and entreaties made to us by our dearest and most beloved wife the queen’ out of her wish to restore ‘unity, charity and harmony’. But the reality of the loveday told a different story. Behind the inane benevolence of the king stood the unyielding will of his queen, and Margaret, it was clear, was the force with whom York would have to reckon if he made any further attempt to take control of government.

Nevertheless, a closer look at the rictus smiles and strained body language of the procession to St Paul’s suggested that this was likely to be the opening gambit of a new phase of hostilities rather than any kind of resolution. The peace negotiations led by the archbishop of Canterbury had been well-intentioned, and York and the Nevilles had conceded a great deal in their search for security through noble unity. But the form of the settlement tackled symptoms, not causes, of conflict, and in doing so it had entrenched division rather than ameliorating it. No attention had been given to the grievances that had driven York and his allies to draw their weapons at St Albans – principally, the difficulty of securing justice and good government when the king was incapable of ruling. That problem, of course, was profoundly intractable, given that the king remained as incapable as ever, and so mediation had focused on the fighting itself and the deaths that had been its result. But the unhappy effect was to predicate peace on a public demonstration that there were still, three years after the battle, two warring factions among the lords, whose enmity was thereby cast in entirely personal terms. One was led by the duke of York. And the other – as their symbolic pairing at the loveday made unmistakably clear – was led by the queen.

Margaret was never likely to be satisfied with a gesture of reconciliation that left York in full possession of the resources which had allowed him to challenge the power of her husband’s crown in the first place. She knew how to be pragmatic: she took the duke’s hand outside the door of St Paul’s with royal condescension, just as she had accepted her failure to secure regency powers during Henry’s illness four years earlier. But her goals, and her implacable determination to reach them, did not change, and there is every sign that she welcomed the drawing up of battle lines that the tense political choreography of the loveday quickly came to represent. That summer she retreated to her citadel at Coventry – leaving York and the Nevilles to see how far they could pull the levers of government in London for a few short months – before riding back to the capital in the autumn to sweep them aside. As the
animating spirit of the royal trinity of king, queen and prince, she took control of royal revenues and appointments to royal office – and began to use both to exclude her enemies from power.

How far she might have to go to achieve that end became apparent a few weeks after her return. The need to neutralise the earl of Warwick – who, as captain of Calais, commanded the only permanent armed force maintained by the English crown – was especially acute, but the very fact of his command in Calais (which had provided him, among other things, with a lucrative sideline in freebooting raids on Channel shipping) made it especially difficult to remove him from office if he did not wish to be replaced. There was more than one way, however, to eliminate an officer of the crown. Perhaps it was coincidence when, in November 1458, the earl became embroiled in a dangerously violent scuffle at court with men of the royal household, but Warwick himself did not think so. He escaped with his life, but clearly had no intention of exposing himself to the ongoing threat that he might encounter a stiletto in the ribs. Together with his father and the duke of York, he abandoned the capital to the queen shortly thereafter.

How far Margaret was prepared to go was also rapidly becoming clear. In May 1459 she too decamped from London to return to her base at Coventry, taking the king and prince with her and summoning the nobles to assemble for a great council in the city in the following month. When York, Salisbury and Warwick failed to appear – which was hardly surprising, given that Coventry was a much more threateningly partisan place than the capital they had already left – charges of treason were laid against them. And any doubt of the danger in which they now found themselves was dispelled by the steps the queen was taking to realise the military potential of her estates by distributing her small son’s livery badge – a swan wearing a crown as a collar around its elegantly curled neck – to those men of the midlands and north-west who committed themselves to serve her in peace and in war.

It was a strategy that would have been familiar to her French forebears. The duchy of Normandy, after all, was now an indivisible
part of the kingdom of France because Philippe II had swept into Rouen at the head of an army, and that had not been the last time a sword had been unsheathed in the French crown’s attempt to impose its authority throughout its kingdom. But in England, where the universal force of royal authority and royal law was already well established, this raising of a regional army could only represent a narrowing of royal power into a partial and partisan interest, with all the loss of legitimacy that implied. It was no accident that the only two kings of England who had lost their crowns had also forfeited their subjects’ trust in their ability to represent the common good of the whole realm: first Edward II, in his blinkered dependence on Hugh Despenser, and then the paranoid Richard II, who had, like Margaret, sought to raise an army in Cheshire to defend a pale of royal authority in the north-west against the enemies he saw everywhere in his own kingdom.

And Margaret was not even a king. Instead, she was a queen seeking to defend the rights of her cipher of a husband by any means necessary. But her refusal, now, to acknowledge the possibility of any middle ground in this conflict – her insistence that those who would not stand with her against York thereby revealed themselves as enemies of the crown – put such strain on the composite authority through which she was trying to rule that it began to disintegrate. What she was demanding of her husband’s subjects was so partisan, so divisive, that the disjuncture between her commanding self and the king and prince from whom she drew her power was ever more exposed.

This fraught relationship between the vestigial power of her husband’s royal persona and the female will by which it was now directed became obvious that autumn when political tension ratcheted up into outbreaks of sickening violence. In September the Nevilles set out across country to converge on a rendezvous with York at his fortress of Ludlow in the Welsh marches – the earl of Warwick fresh from a Channel crossing with a detachment from the Calais garrison riding at his back, and his father Salisbury heading south with troops from his Yorkshire stronghold at
Middleham. They knew they would have to fight – but not how soon. At Blore Heath in Staffordshire on 23 September, Salisbury only narrowly escaped an attempt to intercept him by an army one chronicler described as the ‘queen’s gallants’. After four hours of bloody fighting, two thousand men lay dead on the field, among them the gallants’ venerable commander, the sixty-one-year-old Lord Audley.

For Margaret, waiting for news five miles away, this was the first experience of the frustrations of female command when political skirmishing became open warfare. Matilda, three centuries before her, had known what it was to be a leader who could not lead in battle, but at least that had meant that her cause, depending as it did on her own claim to the crown, could not be summarily decapitated by a sword-thrust or a stray arrow. Margaret, on the other hand, was secure in the knowledge that her husband and son were protected from the dangers of the mêlée by inanity and infancy respectively – but she, who gave direction and purpose to their cause, could offer their troops neither strategy nor encouragement once the enemy was in sight.

The crown that rested on her husband’s head, however, still counted for something. When their forces, regrouped and reinforced after the slaughter at Blore Heath, rode after Salisbury’s men towards Ludlow, they did so with royal banners flying high. And when they camped at Ludford Bridge, just below the looming hill on which York’s castle stood, the Calais soldiers began to desert Warwick’s command, refusing to fight if it meant taking the field against the king’s standard. Salisbury had escaped defeat once, but York could not be confident of doing so again if his forces were melting away. During the night of 12 October, he took the decision not to fight but to flee. York himself rode west under cover of darkness and took ship for Ireland, accompanied by his sixteen-year-old son Edmund, earl of Rutland, while Salisbury and Warwick set sail for Calais, taking with them York’s eldest son, seventeen-year-old Edward, earl of March.

It was the opportunity for which Margaret had so long been
working and waiting. She had mustered an army to defend her husband’s crown and her son’s inheritance, and her enemies had scattered before her. All that remained, it seemed, was to proclaim them the traitors they were. York’s wife Cecily and their younger children were placed in the custody of the duchess’s sister, the duchess of Buckingham, whose husband was now emerging as one of Margaret’s principal supporters. York’s lands and tenants were harried and plundered. And in early December, at the priory of St Mary in Coventry, a specially summoned parliament declared the duke of York and his sons, together with the earl of Salisbury and the earl of Warwick, to be guilty of treason, and their lands and lives forfeit to the crown.