Authors: Sarah Gristwood
The depiction or description of queens at this time often owed more to the ideal than to reality. Marguerite of Anjou, for instance, appeared in one illustration with honey-blonde hair, despite the Milanese description of her as dark. Queens were usually shown as blonde because it was attributed to the Virgin Mary. But surviving images of Elizabeth Woodville do suggest a genuine beauty that shines down the centuries as well as conforming to the medieval ideal – beauty enough to eclipse the trying fashion for a high shaven forehead and hair drawn plainly back. A depiction from the 1470s shows her wearing a red dress beneath a blue cloak, like that of the Virgin Mary – red for earthly nature, blue for heavenly attributes – with roses, emblematic of virginity, and gillyflowers, which stood for virtuous love and motherhood. Elizabeth had chosen the deep red gillyflower as her personal symbol; the name itself meant ‘queen of delights’.
So even Cecily had to admit that there might be ‘nothing to be misliked’ in the person of ‘this widow’. But she, and many others among Edward’s advisers, found plenty more of which to complain. Firstly, of course, there was the simple difference in rank, and the fact that Elizabeth brought no great foreign alliance. Warwick – convinced that only a French marriage would put an end to French support for Marguerite of Anjou – had been in the process of negotiating for Bona of Savoy when Edward broke the news of this other contract. The Italian visitor Mancini would later claim that it was Cecily who declared her son illegitimate since his choice of a woman of lower rank seemingly proved he could not be of the blood of kings.
It is debatable just how far from suitable Elizabeth actually was. Certainly, she was not the princess a king might have been expected to marry. Her mother Jacquetta did come from the cadet branch of the Luxembourg family that gave her connections with the emperors of Germany and the kings of Bohemia. But a woman’s status came from her father, and a mother could not share her superior rank with her husband and children. That said, throughout the Middle Ages high-born women had chosen to reflect their maternal heritage, most notably in the arms displayed on their seals; and when the time came for Elizabeth’s coronation, much play would be made of her connections with European royalty. Then again, there may have been some popularity value in Elizabeth’s very Englishness after the experience with French Marguerite, and even a reconciliatory gain from the Woodville family’s attachment to the Lancastrian cause.
Another problem was Elizabeth’s widowhood. There was a strong sentiment (More and Mancini both put it higher and make it a custom) that the king’s bride should be a virgin, not a widow: even more important if she was to provide the children who would inherit the throne. Decades later Isabella of Castile was still complaining that Edward had refused her for ‘a widow of England’; and the king’s brother Clarence, said Mancini, went so far as to declare the marriage illegal for this reason. Later, another, more serious, issue would raise its head.
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Edward’s response to his mother, More says, was ‘that he knew himself out of her rule’. Playing to Cecily’s well-known religiosity, he added that, ‘marriage being a spiritual thing’, it should follow the guidance of God who had inclined these two parties ‘to love together’
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rather than be made for temporal advantage. As for Warwick, Edward added, surely he could not be so unreasonable as ‘to look that I should in choice of wife rather be ruled by his eye than by my own, as though I were a ward that were bound to marry by the appointment of a guardian’.
Edward was getting tired of his mother’s, and his mentor’s, governance. And anyway, the deed was done; in the face of mounting rumours Edward admitted as much to his council in September 1464 – even if, said Waurin, in a ‘right merry’ way that probably indicated embarrassment. Elizabeth was presented to the court on 30 September in the chapel of Reading Abbey. Led in by Edward’s brother Clarence and the Earl of Warwick for a ceremony that may have been aimed at replacing the big public wedding that was customary for a queen, she received homage offered on bended knee.
The only Englishwoman to become queen consort
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since the Norman Conquest, Elizabeth Woodville was crowned the following spring in a ceremony of great magnificence at which her mother’s royal kin were carefully given a prominent part. Edward had ordered from abroad ‘divers jewels of gold and precious stones, against the Coronation of our dear wife the Queen’; silk for her chairs and saddle; plate, a gold cup and basin at
£
108 5
s
6
d
; and two cloths of gold. Other expenses show a more homely touch: the bridgemaster of London Bridge bought paint, glue, coloured paper, ‘party gold’ and ‘party silver’. Elizabeth was greeted by a pageant as she crossed the river, coming from Eltham to the south. It included six effigies of virgins with kerchiefs on their heads over wigs made of flax and dyed with saffron; and two of angels, their wings resplendent with nine hundred peacock feathers. Elizabeth made her way to the Tower, where tradition dictated she would spend the first night; next day she was carried in a horse litter to Westminster where she was to spend the night, her arrival heralded by the white and blue splendour of several dozen new-made Knights of the Bath.
Details of the coronation survive in a contemporary manuscript. Elizabeth, clad in a purple mantle, entered Westminster Hall under a canopy of cloth of gold, flanked by bishops and with a sceptre in each hand. Removing her shoes before she entered sacred ground, she walked barefoot followed by her attendants: Cecily’s sister, the dowager Duchess of Buckingham; Edward’s sisters Elizabeth and Margaret; the queen’s own mother; and more than forty other ladies of rank. As the procession moved up to the high altar the queen first knelt, and then prostrated herself, for the solemnities. She was anointed with the holy unction and escorted to her throne ‘with great reverence and solemnity’. After mass was sung, the queen processed back into the palace. This, for the queen and to a greater degree for the king, was a ceremony that not only acknowledged but actually created the sacred nature of monarchy.
Elizabeth retired into her chamber before the banquet began: a meal of three ‘courses’, each of some fifteen or twenty dishes, served with the utmost ceremony. First the queen washed in a basin held by the Duke of Clarence. For the entire duration of the meal the Duke of Suffolk (husband of the king’s sister Elizabeth) and the Earl of Essex knelt beside her. To signal each course trumpets were sounded, and a procession of mounted knights made the rounds of the great Westminster Hall. Musicians played ‘full melodiously and in most solemn wise’, and the festivities ended next day with a tournament. The king had not been present at the ceremonies, and this was an accepted tradition: the queen was always the most important person at her own coronation. But there is another whose name does not appear in the records: the king’s mother, Cecily.
It was at this time that Cecily elaborated her title of ‘My Lady the King’s Mother’
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– used by her, though more often accorded to Margaret Beaufort – into ‘Cecily, the king’s mother, and late wife unto Richard in right king of England and of France and lord of Ireland’, or, more directly, ‘Queen by Right’. Though she spent less time now at court she still kept an apartment – the ‘queen’s chambers’ – in one of the royal palaces. Rather than attempt to dispossess his mother, Edward built a new one for his wife.
According to one report – admittedly made to Elizabeth’s brother – the marriage was, broadly speaking, acceptable in the country: Marguerite, and the turmoil for which she was blamed, had put the ordinary people off foreign royalty. But a newsletter from Bruges reported differently, stating that the ‘greater part of the lords and the people in general seem very much dissatisfied’. In court circles it was certainly unwelcome. Woodville ascendancy was bound to upset both the royal family and the great magnate Warwick; the more so, since those who had shed blood for York now saw a household of Lancastrians raised to high status.
And, being a woman, I will not be slack
To play my part in Fortune’s pageant.
Henry VI Part 2
, 1.2
In April 1462 the last queen, the deposed Marguerite, had made her way from Scotland to France; a register of the city of Rouen, published in July, describes her a few months afterwards being received ‘with much honour, by the gentlemen of the King’s suite’, and lodging in the house of a Rouen lawyer. Since the previous year she had been using her old admirer Pierre de Brezé to negotiate a loan and a fleet with which to seize the Channel Islands as a bridgehead from France to England: ‘If the Queen’s intentions were discovered, her friends would unite with her enemies to kill her,’ de Brezé said. Foreseeing ‘good winnings’, the French king Louis (possibly under pressure from his mother, Marguerite’s aunt) did eventually give her aid, with Marguerite, in a gesture which would have horrified her English subjects, promising to cede him Calais in return. In the autumn of 1462 she had sailed back to Scotland, bringing forty ships and eight hundred soldiers provided by the French king and under de Brezé’s command. Collecting some Scots led by Somerset (and nominally by the deposed Henry VI), she pushed across the border into northern England where she made ‘open war’, as the
Great Chronicle of London
put it.
Her campaign was unsuccessful. When the Yorkist guns on England’s northern coast were trained upon her she was forced to turn tail: ‘And in a carvel, wherein was the substance of her goods, she fled; and as she sailed there came upon her such a tempest that she was fain to leave the carvel and take a fisher’s boat, and so went a-land to Berwick; and the said carvel and goods were drowned.’ Edward himself rode north to confront her; but the next spring, as
Gregory’s Chronicle
describes it, she was still fighting on in the north.
In the summer of 1463 there took place one of the few episodes from these wars which have been converted into story. The Duke of Burgundy’s official historian Georges Chastellain may have heard the gist of it from Marguerite herself only a few months later – but Chastellain was a poet and rhetorician as much as a chronicler, for whom the message may have been more important than the facts. As Marguerite and her party were fleeing back towards Bamburgh, so the story runs, she and her son were separated from their followers. Suddenly a band of robbers leaped out of the bushes, seized the baggage, tore the jewels from around her neck and dragged her before their leader. He had drawn his sword to cut her throat when she threw herself on her knees and implored him not to disfigure her body past recognition, for, as she said: ‘I am the daughter and wife of a king, and was in past times recognized by yourselves as your queen.’ In the best tradition of monster-taming myth, the man, known as Black Jack, in turn fell on his knees before her and then led her and her son to a secret cave in Deepden Woods, where she sheltered until de Brezé found her.
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Less romantic, if perhaps also exaggerated, is the fact that, as Chastellain tells it, Marguerite was now so poor she had to borrow a groat from a Scottish archer to make an offering on St Margaret’s feast day. Indeed, for five days Chastellain claims, she and her husband and son were forced to subsist on a single day’s ration of bread, and ‘one herring between the three’.
There is, of course, an air of unreality about Chastellain’s story, but there is no doubt that Margaret went back to the continent, leaving her husband behind to roam as a fugitive in the north, hiding in friendly houses. Over the next few years she attempted to rally support from the rulers of Brittany, Burgundy, Germany and Portugal, as well as France. Chastellain describes not only her forcible pleading with the European monarchs but the ‘wonder’ caused by her arrival in Burgundy, since she had once been the duke’s mortal enemy. ‘Wherefore were heard divers murmurs against her in many mouths, and many savage comments on the nature of her misfortune.’ Marguerite, Chastellain says, arrived in Burgundy:
poor and alone, destitute of goods and all desolate; [she] had neither credence, nor money, nor goods, nor jewels to pledge. [She] had her son, no royal robes, nor estate; and her person without adornment befitting a queen. Her body was clad in one single robe, with no change of clothing. [She] had no more than seven women for her retinue, and whose apparel was like that of their mistress, formerly one of the most splendid women of the world and now one of the poorest; and finally she had no other provision nor even bread to eat, except from the purse of her knight… . It was a thing piteous to see, truly, this high princess so cast down and laid low in such great danger, dying of hunger and hardship.
For all his sympathy, it is hard not to feel that the Burgundian chronicler was relishing the drama of Marguerite’s ‘lowliness and abasement’ as he describes how the English in Calais were trying to capture her, how she had been forced to travel in a farm cart ‘covered over with canvas and harnessed with four mares like a poor woman going unknown’. The Burgundian duke tried to dodge her for a time, but when Marguerite sent word that: ‘Were my cousin of Burgundy to go to the end of the world I would follow him’ he gave way, and after meeting her sent both financial aid and his sister the Duchess of Bourbon as a companion. The two women struck up an eager friendship, with Marguerite recounting amazing adventures. The duchess agreed that if a book were to be written on the troubles of royal ladies, Marguerite’s would be acknowledged as the most shocking of catastrophes.