She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (54 page)

It was not, of course, quite that simple. Although the south of England was agog with expectation and relief at Edward’s accession, his new-found authority was much more precarious in the north and west, in the parts of Wales and northern England that Margaret had counted her heartlands. And, crucially, his enemies – Margaret, Henry and their son, the king’s half-brother Jasper Tudor, and the dukes of Somerset and Exeter who had fled for their lives
from the slaughter at Towton – were still at large, despite strenuous efforts to convince observers at home and abroad that they were safely in custody. ‘I do not believe that, since vain flowers always grow in good news,’ Prospero di Camulio, the Milanese ambassador at the French court, wrote with some asperity to his duke, Francesco Sforza; ‘… if the king and queen of England with the other fugitives are not taken,’ he added, circumspectly slipping into cipher, ‘it seems certain that in time fresh disturbances will arise.’

Fresh disturbances were certainly Margaret’s intention. Unhappy though the comparison might be in the eyes of her adopted countrymen, had not her uncle Charles VII ejected the English from his kingdom of France even after her husband had been crowned in Paris? The accession of a Yorkist king was an illegitimate and therefore temporary interruption to her husband’s rights and her son’s future inheritance, which she would reclaim with the help of her uncle of France and that of his steadfast allies, her present hosts in Edinburgh.

The price, however, was high. The Scots and the French were fierce guardians of their own interests, not partisans of Margaret’s cause. The cost of Scots support was the immediate surrender of the contested border town of Berwick and the promise of Carlisle, if it could be captured. Her hopes for support from her uncle of France were dashed when news reached Scotland of Charles’s death on 22 July – the very day on which she had written to ask for his help – and the succession of his son, Louis XI, a strategist so subtle he was dubbed ‘the spider king’, who had already as dauphin offered assistance to the Yorkists’ cause. Nevertheless, a visit by Margaret to the French court in the spring and summer of 1462 produced a treaty and a loan, albeit on the alarming (and prudently hidden) condition that Calais should be put up as security.

Margaret was working hard and hoping for much, but the longer this intricate diplomatic dance continued, the more uncertain became the ground beneath her feet. The passage of time served only to reinforce Edward’s stature as king, and to chip away at what remained of the fragmented authority to which she herself could lay
claim. At the first parliament of the new reign, held at Westminster in November 1461, the queen and prince (‘Edward
her
son’, as the parliamentary proceedings pointedly called him) were attainted of treason on the grounds of offences ‘committed against her faith and allegiance to our sovereign and liege lord King Edward’. Such a description of her actions against a man whose sovereignty she had never acknowledged and would never recognise might well have raised a hollow laugh from Margaret; but this formal denunciation served to give public sanction to what was now an unstoppable flood of venomous innuendo and propaganda.

All the old rumours about the queen’s aberrant behaviour had sprung into newly elaborate life in the nerve-wracking weeks before Towton. Gossip in Brussels had it that Margaret had persuaded Henry to abdicate in favour of their son, Prospero di Camulio reported, and that the queen had then poisoned her husband (‘at least he has known how to die, if he did not know what to do else’) in order to marry the duke of Somerset. Di Camulio was not convinced by this ornately melodramatic tale, or by Henry’s alleged remark that the prince ‘must be the son of the Holy Spirit’ – an observation that was, in any case, altogether too sharp to be plausibly the king’s – but he thought them worth recounting nonetheless.

Meanwhile, propagandists for the new regime in England were offering a more direct political commentary on Margaret’s activities. ‘It is right a great abusion’, one poem in circulation in 1462 argued,

Long-standing insinuations about the queen’s conduct could now be spoken openly. Margaret’s self-assertion was illegitimate and reprehensible because she was female, and her intentions toward her adopted country were hostile and destructive. This foreign-born queen was damned twice over, by her birth and by her sex; and her plight now, as a refugee dragging her husband and son between the courts of England’s old enemies, dependent on their charity and seeking their aid, only served to emphasise those two dangerous failings.

Nor was the new Yorkist regime slow to underline the point. In March 1462 King Edward wrote to the aldermen of London and other sympathisers with deep purses to ask for their help in resisting a fearsome French invasion by which ‘the people, the name, the tongue and the blood English’ would be wiped out – a scheme to which his ‘adversary Henry’ had been moved ‘by the malicious and subtle suggestion and enticing of the said malicious woman Margaret, his wife’. And rumour fed thirstily on rumour until it was reported that Margaret and Henry would return at the head of an army made up, hydra-like, of contingents from Brittany, Burgundy, Scotland and Spain, with fresh waves of hundreds of thousands more troops sent by the kings of France, Aragon, Denmark, Sicily, Navarre and Portugal waiting to overwhelm England’s shores.

Despite all the wild speculation and Margaret’s unrelenting diplomatic efforts, her invasion fleet, when it finally landed on the Northumbrian coast in October 1462, numbered only forty-two ships carrying scarcely more than eight hundred men, the meagre reward of her agreement that summer with Louis XI. Northumberland was friendly country, a stronghold of Percy influence where the new king’s authority was tenuous in the extreme, and the great fortresses of Bamburgh, Dunstanburgh and Alnwick quickly opened their gates to the queen’s soldiers. But news came that Edward was marching north at the head of a massive army, and Margaret, knowing that her resources were desperately limited, left garrisons to hold the castles as best they could against Yorkist siege and took ship for a storm-battered retreat to Scotland.
A further advance from Berwick in the summer of 1463 – Margaret, Henry and their son at the head of troops provided by the queen mother of Scotland – was also quickly rebuffed by forceful Yorkist resistance.

It was devastatingly clear now that, however great the ostensible insecurities of King Edward’s regime and however certain Margaret was of the justice of her cause, England was not waiting breathlessly for the chance to rise up in support of Henry VI. His shortcomings, after all, were the same as they had ever been, and the sight of his queen in the company of French or Scottish soldiers was hardly likely to convince the apprehensive inhabitants of northern England that their best interests lay in his restoration. By the autumn of 1463 it was also unhappily apparent that Margaret was not orchestrating the diplomacy in which she was so intensely engaged. Instead – and unsurprisingly, given how few moves she had left to make – she found herself a pawn in others’ schemes. She had sailed again to France that summer, after the damp squib of the Scottish campaign, in a determined attempt to shore up the support she had been promised by the slippery Louis XI, but during the autumn and winter her understandings with both France and Scotland collapsed as both kingdoms found themselves persuaded of the superior benefits of dealing with Yorkist England.

Pawn or no, Margaret would never give in. She established herself at her father’s castle of Koeur near St Mihiel-en-Bar, 150 miles east of Paris, with her ten-year-old son as always at her side, at the head of a small and impoverished court of loyalists. There they continued their efforts, even submerged as they were in the powerful currents of European politics, and despite the desperate paucity of their resources, both financial and diplomatic; one ill-fated attempt to solicit help from Portugal was hampered by the fact that no one among the little band at Koeur could quite remember the name of the Portuguese king. ‘Yet the queen sustains us in meat and drink,’ Margaret’s chancellor John Fortescue reported in December 1464 – and in purpose, too, he might have added. ‘Her highness may do no more to us than she does.’

But by then, it seemed, they were lost in political darkness. Back in 1463, Margaret had left Henry in the safekeeping of the Scots, but their treaty with Edward at the end of that year had left her husband a fugitive, a pitiful, lost figure moving from refuge to refuge in northern England. There were grounds for hope that sympathy for his cause might run deep enough in the northern counties to keep him safe, and by the spring of 1464 he was still at liberty. Then, however, such loyalist forces as remained under the command of the duke of Somerset – who had himself despaired of their chances so much that he had flirted with defection to King Edward’s court in 1463 – sought to ambush the earl of Warwick’s brother John Neville, Lord Montagu, at Hedgeley Moor a few miles from Alnwick in Northumberland. But Somerset’s men were caught in their own trap, and put to flight after damaging losses; and at Hexham on 14 May Montagu inflicted the final blow. The duke lost his head the day after the battle, and with this forceful, mercurial man – who was still only twenty-eight, and had spent his entire adult life fighting to defend Henry’s crown – military resistance on English soil was finally spent.

Montagu found Henry’s jewelled and gold-embroidered hat at nearby Bywell Castle, but of the king himself there was no sign. For twelve more months Henry eked out a wretched existence, constantly moving from place to place with two or three devoted attendants. But at last in July 1465 he was captured near a ford across the river Ribble in Lancashire, and taken under guard to London with his feet tied to the stirrups of his horse. He was treated gently, and his life was in no danger, since there was no advantage to Edward in Henry’s death while his wife and son remained at liberty. Much better, the king knew, for his rival for the throne to be an imprisoned fool than a boy growing to manhood in France in the care of his indefatigable mother. And, with Henry under lock and key in the Tower and Margaret and their son in impoverished exile, there seemed little need for serious concern about a revival in the fortunes of this Lancastrian dynasty. ‘No man living can see far ahead at present in the affairs of England,’
Prospero di Camulio had written in 1461; but four years later it appeared that some predictions, at least, could be made with confidence.

That, however, was to reckon without the Yorkist regime itself, and the capacity for self-destruction it was already beginning to exhibit. Forged in adversity, the alliance between the young king and his Neville cousins was close and intense, but Edward’s relationship with his oldest cousin Warwick was beginning to show signs of profound strain. Warwick’s pivotal role in the Yorkist campaigns that led to Edward’s accession had been rewarded with wide-ranging powers: as well as captain of Calais, he was now great chamberlain and admiral of England, warden of the Cinque Ports (the key harbours for trade and defence on the south-eastern coast) and – together with his brother Montagu – warden of the borderlands with Scotland in the north. The king had leaned heavily on Warwick in the establishment and defence of his new regime, but Warwick had arrogance and ambition exceeding even his undoubted ability and spectacular wealth, and it was becomingly ominously apparent that he saw himself as the power behind the Yorkist throne by right rather than royal command.

It was a view of his importance that was shared by many observers. ‘They say that every day favours the earl of Warwick, who seems to me to be everything in this kingdom,’ the duke of Milan was told in 1461. Three years later, a similar assessment, more archly expressed, was despatched to Louis XI: in England, wrote the governor of Abbeville, ‘they have but two rulers – Monsieur de Warwick, and another, whose name I have forgotten’. But Edward himself could not afford to accommodate his cousin’s pretensions if he were ever to exercise the untrammelled authority of a legitimate king.

The first indication of a rift between the two men had come in the spring of 1464, when Edward was riding north to meet ambassadors from Scotland in the wake of the defeat of the duke of Somerset at Hedgeley Moor. On his way, he stopped for a night at Stony Stratford in Buckinghamshire and, early the next morning,
went out alone for several hours. On his return, he told his servants that he had been hunting, and retired to bed again to sleep. It was not until four months later that Edward revealed the extraordinary truth: on that May morning he had married in secret, without either consulting or informing his lords and advisers.

Still more astonishing was the identity of his bride. The twenty-two-year-old king had taken as his wife Elizabeth Woodville, a widow five years his senior and already the mother of two young sons, whose first husband, a knight named Sir John Grey, had been killed fighting in Margaret’s army against the earl of Warwick at St Albans in 1461. It seems likely that this match – not so much politically inappropriate as politically inconceivable – was an impetuous choice precipitated by personal, not political, impulses. Elizabeth, it was rapidly noted, had a steely intelligence to match her exquisite beauty, and had allegedly refused the king’s advances unless he married her. But when Edward somewhat sheepishly broke the news of his wedding to his council four months later, the announcement had the supplementary effect of manifesting the king’s independence from his cousin of Warwick, who was left embarrassingly marooned in the midst of negotiating a match for Edward with the French king’s sister-in-law.