She-Wolves: The Women Who Ruled England Before Elizabeth (55 page)

Watching hawkishly from her impecunious little court at Koeur, Margaret was quick to see the significance of this enjoyable humiliation for a long-loathed adversary. ‘The queen, wife of King Henry, has written to the king here that she is advised that King Edward and the earl of Warwick have come to very great division and war together,’ the Milanese ambassador reported from France in February 1465. ‘She begs the king here to be pleased to give her help so that she may be able to recover her kingdom, or at least allow her to receive assistance from the lords of this kingdom who are willing to afford this …’ (‘Look how proudly she writes,’ King Louis observed, with a mixture of amusement and admiration.)

She was right that the disintegrating relationship between Edward and Warwick was a disaster waiting to happen for the Yorkist regime, but the opportunity it afforded her was more complex,
more costly and much slower to materialise than she had hoped in the spring of 1465. Warwick would not lightly loosen his grip on power, and Edward had no wish to alienate his cousin completely. The earl therefore put a brave and graceful face on a marriage he had no choice but to accept as a fait accompli, standing godfather in February 1466 to the king’s first child, a daughter named Elizabeth after her mother, and presiding at the magnificent feast held to celebrate the emergence from her confinement of the lovely and unsuitable new queen.

By the summer of 1467, however, Edward’s increasingly obdurate refusal to follow Warwick’s direction in the conduct of his kingdom’s diplomacy was played out on an unforgivingly public stage. Warwick, who had been pressing hard for an alliance with France, left England for Rouen in May to take the lead in negotiations with Louis XI. Edward, meanwhile, was inclining increasingly explicitly towards a treaty with France’s bitter enemy Philippe of Burgundy, ruler of not only the great duchy of Burgundy on France’s eastern border but also the rich territories of Flanders and the Netherlands. And while Warwick was away, Edward remained in London to entertain Duke Philippe’s illegitimate son at a sumptuous tournament. When Warwick returned home at the end of June with a deputation of French ambassadors swelling his train, it was to find that Edward was already committed to a Burgundian alliance, and that his own brother George Neville, the archbishop of York, had been summarily dismissed as England’s chancellor. Warwick’s pointed and public response was to leave court, riding at the head of his entourage for his estates in the north.

For Margaret, this breach between her two chief enemies represented a chink in the Yorkist armour through which she might hope to strike a fatal blow. That her dreams were not entirely misconceived was evident in the French king’s willingness for the first time in years to lend support to an attempted invasion. In June 1468 a small Lancastrian force made landfall in north Wales under the command of Jasper Tudor, who was not only a tireless supporter of his half-brother’s cause but had become, in exile, a
trusted servant of Louis himself. Only a few weeks passed before Tudor’s efforts were repelled and Margaret’s hopes dashed; but already, in the alienation between Warwick and Edward and the increasingly unsettled state of Yorkist England, Louis’s incisive intelligence had seen the possibility of a different – and an entirely extraordinary – way forward.

More than a year earlier, in February 1467, Louis had been involved in a sharp exchange at dinner with Margaret’s brother Jean, who held the title of duke of Calabria as heir to their father, Duke René. The French king had been generous in his commendation of the earl of Warwick as a friend to France, which had provoked Duke Jean to vituperative anger, the Milanese ambassador reported:

Louis, however, persisted in his praise of Warwick, and the conversation became more heated: ‘the duke said that, as he was so fond of him, he ought to try and restore his sister in that kingdom, when he would make sure of it as much as he was sure at present and even more so’.

These were barbed words spoken on impulse, rendered indistinct in the retelling by the repeated, undifferentiated pronouns, but the apparent suggestion that French favour to the earl of Warwick and support for the restoration of King Henry and Queen Margaret might not, in spite of everything, be mutually incompatible was a seed that began to germinate. Warwick, after all, had the men and money within England to launch a coup from the very heart of the Yorkist establishment, thereby obviating the need for any French commitment to wholesale military intervention across the Channel; and Henry – as represented by Margaret and her son – had the claim to royal authority that would allow the overthrow
of Edward and, with him, the destruction of England’s threatening alliance with Burgundy. Three months later, this dinner-table banter had made its way onto the diplomatic agenda, within French counsels at least. When another report was despatched across the Alps to Milan on 19 May, the news from the French court centred on the impending arrival of Warwick’s embassy at Rouen and the simultaneous rumours of Edward’s intention to agree a treaty with Burgundy. ‘If this takes place’, the Milanese informants observed, ‘they have talked of treating with the earl of Warwick to restore King Henry in England, and the ambassador of the old queen of England is already here.’

What is certain, however, is that – eager though Warwick and Margaret both were to cultivate Louis’s support – neither was yet prepared to countenance this bizarre proposal. Yes, Warwick was estranged from his king, and disposed, it seemed increasingly likely, to do something about his growing disaffection. But his plans did not involve the woman responsible for the deaths of his father and brother, whom for fifteen years he had regarded as a mortal enemy. And for Margaret the feeling was entirely mutual.

When Warwick finally made his move, therefore, it was on his own terms, while Margaret and her little band of loyalists at Koeur could do no more than follow the bulletins that reached them via sympathetic eyes and ears in England and at the French king’s court. The earl had laid his plans well, convincing Edward that, after a winter spent brooding in his northern strongholds, he was willing to accept a role in royal government that was one of influence rather than control, at the king’s right hand rather than pulling his strings. So when Edward made his leisurely way north from London in June 1469, he believed he was faced with a little local difficulty, an eruption of discontent in Yorkshire over taxes he had demanded to pay for an invasion of France which had failed to materialise once the money lay safely in the royal coffers. He had reached the midlands when he heard the chilling news that he faced not a peasant rabble but the might of the earl of Warwick’s army.

The shockwaves of this Yorkist rising against the Yorkist king rippled across Europe. It seemed scarcely credible that the two great architects of King Henry’s fall might now face each other across the field of battle. And shock, it appeared, might seal King Edward’s fate, since his hurried, urgent attempt to muster troops in his own defence was outmanoeuvred by the carefully planned deployment of Warwick’s forces. On 29 July the king set out to meet reinforcements who had already, though he did not know it, been defeated. He was captured on the road and taken under armed guard, icy but impotent in his rage, first to his cousin’s castle at Warwick, and then north to the Neville fortress at Middleham.

The initial stage of Warwick’s plan – to take control of government by seizing control of the king – had worked, so far as it went. What to do next, however, was less straightforward. Efforts to rule in the name of Henry VI, a king manifestly incompetent to govern for himself, had proved self-defeating and unsustainable, as Warwick well knew. Ruling in the name of King Edward, who was all too obviously neither incapable of making his own decisions nor content to be kept under lock and key, turned out to be impossible. As the country erupted into disorder – which Warwick proved unable to contain on the authority of a king whom the earl himself was holding captive – his options appeared unnervingly limited.

One of his less likely supporters probably had a more creative solution in mind. Extraordinarily, Edward’s younger brother George, duke of Clarence, had joined Warwick in rebellion against the king, apparently in pique at Edward’s refusal to allow him to marry Isabel, the elder of Warwick’s two daughters, who would one day inherit all their father’s vast territorial riches. On 11 July, in an act of open defiance, Clarence had taken Isabel as his wife at his new father-in-law’s stronghold of Calais, but this was only the first of the benefits he hoped to receive from the new dispensation in English politics. The twenty-year-old duke was King Edward’s next male heir, Queen Elizabeth having presented her husband with three daughters in the five years of their marriage so far, and
it seems likely that Clarence – who was vain, vaultingly ambitious and profoundly immature – hoped that Warwick’s coup would sweep him to the throne in his brother’s place.

The duke’s shallow narcissism, however, was reason enough – especially in the absence of any arguable case for his right to the crown – to leave Clarence himself as his scheme’s only supporter. And when at the end of August Lancastrian sympathisers in the far north seized this unanticipated chance to raise the standard of revolt in King Henry’s name, Warwick found that he had no choice but to release the other imprisoned king of England, since no one would answer a call for troops on his own questionable authority while Edward remained in custody. At that point, with Edward free and the rebels’ heads safely on spikes at York, Warwick discovered that, having taken the royal genie out of the bottle, he could not easily put it back.

By mid-October the king had made a triumphal entry into London, to be greeted by the aldermen and guilds of the city decked out in their best scarlet and blue. Observers on the continent had no idea what to think; ‘… things there are in the air without it being possible to form a sound judgement as to what the end will be’, the Milanese ambassador reported from Orléans. ‘Indeed, His Majesty is puzzled as well as everyone else.’ But Louis XI was no more or less confused than Edward’s subjects in London. ‘I know not what to suppose therein,’ wrote Sir John Paston from his lodgings in the capital. ‘The king himself has good language of the lords of Clarence, of Warwick … saying they are his best friends. But his household men have other language, so what shall hastily fall I cannot say.’

For five months the cousins circled one another, Edward realising, with epic self-restraint, that he could not bring Warwick to heel until he could be sure of military support to match the earl’s own, and Warwick trying to gauge the ramifications of his own inadvertent demonstration that, while Edward remained king, he could not govern without him. The truth was that the earl had few options left to consider. He could take Edward’s public magnanimity
at face value; or he could take the logic of his own self-assertion to its obvious conclusion. He chose the latter. When the king took the field in March 1470 to quash a ‘popular’ revolt in Lincolnshire, it was to discover that the rebels were wearing the liveries of Warwick and Clarence, and interrogations carried out after the battle revealed that Warwick was now prepared to depose Edward and make Clarence England’s king.

Unfortunately for these rebel lords, however, no one else among Edward’s subjects was inclined to agree. Warwick’s determination to secure his ‘rightful’ place in government and Clarence’s vapid self-aggrandisement had taken them far beyond any sustainable conception of legitimate authority. When they found that they could command no support against Edward’s advancing army, they fled across the Channel, only to discover that Warwick had tried the loyalty of his faithful Calais garrison one step too far. With the harbour at Calais closed to them, his small party was left adrift at sea. The first son of Clarence and his eighteen-year-old duchess was born, and died, on board ship while they contemplated their fate.

It lay in France. Now, at last, was the moment for King Louis’s impossible plan to come to fruition. Edward must be removed from the throne, on that Warwick could finally agree. And the only credible contender to replace him – credible, that is, simply by virtue of the fact that he had already worn the crown for forty years – was the man Warwick’s father and brother had died to depose. Still, time had passed, and needs must. There was no way for Warwick but forward. And before him stood his oldest and most determined enemy.

Less than two months after Warwick’s small flotilla landed at Honfleur in Normandy, Margaret arrived at the royal palace of Amboise in the company of her son who, at sixteen, had grown to manhood in exile. He (it had been reported in Milan three years before) was as obsessed with military matters as his father was oblivious to them, talking ‘of nothing but of cutting off heads or making war, as if he had everything in his hands or was the god of
battle or the peaceful possessor of that throne’. But Margaret still, as she had always done, made strategy in his name. And she faced an unwelcome choice.

For years her tirelessness in pursuing the rights of her husband and son had been matched only by the hopelessness of her task. Now, suddenly, real help and real hope were within her reach. But to grasp them she had to take the hand of a man she hated, despised and mistrusted. The more cynically political among her entourage, her chancellor John Fortescue among them, were quick to press the unanswerable logic of the case, but Margaret had been sustained through long years of conflict and isolation by her confidence in the justice of her cause and the impiousness of her enemies, and that was not so easily set aside. King Louis devoted all his attention to this newly honoured but frustratingly uncooperative guest, spending long days patiently closeted with the queen, who ‘until now’, the Milanese envoy noted on 29 June, ‘has shown herself very hard and difficult’.