Authors: Sarah Gristwood
Elizabeth Woodville and her kin were, of course, always blamed for greed; and certainly the Woodvilles were not only prominent in the councils leading up to Clarence’s trial but joined in the general harvest of Clarence’s goods and offices. Mancini says it was now, with Clarence dead and Richard lying low on his own lands, that Elizabeth really started to ennoble her relatives. ‘Besides, she attracted to her party many strangers and introduced them to court, so that they alone should manage the public and private businesses of the crown, surround the king, and have bands of retainers, give or sell offices, and finally rule the very king himself.’ But as Mancini was also suggesting, there could have been another reason for her particular animosity towards Clarence at this time. His suggestion of ‘calumnies’ against her – ‘namely that according to established usage she was not the legitimate wife of the king’ – may have been just another rehashing of the old outcry against the secrecy of her marriage, her position as a widow. But it is also possible that Clarence was holding dangerous knowledge over his brother’s and sister-in-law’s heads.
One theory is that Clarence had been dropping hints about a lady called Eleanor Butler to whom, it was alleged, Edward had been pre-contracted or indeed actually married in the early 1460s – making his subsequent marriage to Elizabeth Woodville invalid. Eleanor, daughter of the great Earl of Shrewsbury,
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was a widow of rank and notable piety who had died in 1468; Edward would have met her at the very beginning of his reign. (More says that Edward boasted of having three concubines: the merriest, the holiest and the wisest harlot in the kingdom. If Jane Shore was the merriest, Eleanor might have been the holiest.) Commynes says that Edward ‘promised to marry her, provided that he could sleep with her first, and she consented’ – the same technique he practised on Elizabeth Woodville. Commynes says also that Robert Stillington (later Bishop of Bath and Wells) ‘had married them’, though his involvement would hardly have been necessary: witnessed consent and consummation alone would have sufficed. Mancini and Vergil too make reference to the story. The implication is that Stillington (who seems now to have been cast briefly into prison, possibly for something to do with the Clarence affair) had passed this lethal information either directly to Clarence or to Eleanor’s sister the Duchess of Norfolk and her husband, friends of his – the same duchess whose little daughter Anne Mowbray had just been snapped up as a royal bride.
But evidence for all this is circumstantial: Eleanor’s arranging for the disposition of her property in the form open to a married woman, rather than that possible only for a widow; and the coincidence of Stillington’s career now and later. Against that, there are no signs that, after Eleanor’s death, Edward and Elizabeth attempted to regularise their liaison. Thomas More, after all, muddied the waters considerably by saying that Edward was pre-contracted not to Eleanor but to another of his mistresses by whom he had had a child, a married woman of lower rank called Elizabeth Lucy.
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The question is whether he did so from ignorance, or in order to discredit a story so potentially damaging to the Tudor dynasty.
Probably the most that can be said is that Edward’s pattern of behaviour with his women makes it impossible simply to dismiss the tale. But whether the allegation is true or false, if Clarence were indeed spreading this rumour it lends weight to the idea that Elizabeth Woodville believed him a threat to her children. The story would certainly reappear, greatly to her sons’ detriment, a few years down the line.
Where did the other women in the family stand – and what, more particularly, was Cecily Neville’s attitude, faced with this lethal rift among her children? The short answer is that we do not know. Crowland relates that in parliament ‘not a single person uttered a word against the duke, except the king; not one individual made answer to the king except the duke’. It is said that Edward later lamented that ‘not one creature’ interceded for Clarence. But women, of course, would not be speaking in a parliament anyway: whatever was said by them, was said behind closed doors and was not recorded. At any rate, she made no cries of protest loud enough to catch the ear of any contemporary observer. It is often said that it was Cecily’s pleading which won Clarence the right to choose his own manner of death, but evidence is hard to find. (The contemporary chronicler Jean de Roye wrote in his journal, the
Chronique scandaleuse
, that the dreadful sentence of hanging, drawing and quartering had been commuted ‘by the great prayer and request of the mother’, but his nineteenth-century editor Bernard de Mondrot pointed out that the words ‘of the mother’ were added between the lines, and in a later hand.)
Certainly Cecily had been present when, the day before the parliament began that was to try Clarence, the little Duke of York was married to Anne Mowbray. Perhaps she had at last given up on this particular branch of the Yorkist tree. It was, after all, Clarence who had impugned her chastity. One of the grounds on which he was accused was that he had ‘upon one of the falsest and most unnatural coloured pretences that man might imagine, falsely and untruly noised, published and said, that the King our Sovereign Lord was a Bastard, and not begotten to reign upon us’.
Others have seen this very differently. One theory is that it was Cecily who offered Clarence the idea of her adultery, in pursuit of the family good. This was a world where, as one author puts it,
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other loyalties might sometimes have to take precedence over ‘the sacredness of each individual life’; and that conflict would be even more crucial for the York family in the years ahead. These were the stark choices Cecily would have to contemplate – not once, but repeatedly. It would seem she accepted Clarence’s death. But it may have significantly altered her life.
From this point there are fewer mentions of Cecily taking part in court rituals. Naturally, the business of running her estates continued. Besides her main residence, ‘our Castle of Berkhamsted’, letters are signed from ‘our place at Baynard’s Castle’ and from the priory at Merton. She never ceased to exercise her good ladyship
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– to administer her lands and insist on her dignities. One letter from her begins: ‘By the rightful inheritor’s wife of the realm of England and of France, and lordship of Ireland, the king’s mother, Duchess of York.’ Another sent a stinging reproof to an officer she felt had fallen down over the administration of her East Anglian lands. He should amend on his ‘faithful and true devoir [duty]’, and ‘fail not hereof as you will avoid the awful peril that may ensue with our great displeasure and heavy ladyship’.
She can be glimpsed
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licensing seven men in Thaxted to form a fraternity in 1481; joining in Edward’s petition on behalf of a Carthusian monastery to which, the letter urged, the king’s mother ‘has a singular devotion’; requesting absolution for a clerk of the diocese of York notwithstanding his ‘bigamy and irregularity’. But at Berkhamsted she seems to have adopted a life of increasing piety. A few years later
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Cecily’s daily regime was recorded at length for posterity.
She is accustomed to arise at seven o’clock and has ready her chaplain to say with her matins of the day, and matins of Our Lady; and when she is full ready she has a low mass in her chamber, and after mass she takes something to recreate [recruit, restore] nature; and so goes to the chapel, hearing the divine service and two low masses; thence to dinner, during the time thereof she has a reading of holy matter … .
After dinner she gives audience to all such as has any matter to show to her by the space of one hour; and then she sleeps one quarter of an hour, and after she has slept she continues in prayer to the first peal of evensong; then she drinks wine or ale at her pleasure. Forthwith her chaplain is ready to say with her both evensongs; and after the last peal she goes to the chapel and hears evensong by note; from thence to supper, and in the time of supper she recites the reading that was had at dinner to those that be in her presence.
After supper she disposes herself to be familiar with her gentlewomen, to the following of honest mirth; and one hour before her going to bed, she takes a cup of wine, and after that goes to her private closet, and takes her leave of God for all night, making end of her prayers for that day; and by eight of the clock she is in bed. I trust to Our Lord’s mercy that this noble princess thus divides her hours to His high pleasure.
Cecily had chosen what the age called the mixed life:
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the ‘medled [
sic
] life that is to say sometime active sometime contemplative’, as it was described by the late fourteenth-century northern cleric and author Nicholas Love, whose translation of the
Life of Christ
was in Cecily’s library alongside numerous other devotional works. So too was the
Letter on the Mixed Life
written by Love’s associate Walter Hilton, while
The Abbey of the Holy Ghost
(of which Cecily’s daughter Margaret of Burgundy owned a copy) was written to teach those ‘unable to leave the world how they might build an abbey in their soul and keep the rules of an order in their heart’. Cecily’s was an English, a less intellectual, version of the
devotio moderna
which her daughter espoused in its full reforming fervour.
Cecily also owned copies of
De Infantia Salvatoris
(apocryphal stories of the miracles of Christ’s infancy) and of the ever-popular
Legenda Aurea
, the Golden Legend. But she also owned copies of the lives and visions of the great female mystics like Matilda of Hackenborn, Saint Bridget of Sweden and Saint Catherine of Siena. It was St Catherine who advised those who wished to follow her example, but were still constrained by the demands of the world: ‘Build a cell inside your mind, from which you can never flee.’
Cecily’s piety has traditionally been seen almost as a psychological alibi that allowed her to sail tranquilly above the turmoils of her family. She must often have needed the sense of a special relationship with God, and might have reflected on the biblical stories of brothers’ struggles: Esau and Jacob, whose mother Rebecca showed him how to snatch his elder brother’s birthright; Joseph, whose brothers conspired to kill him; David, chosen to be the king of the Jews above his elder brother Elijah.
It is conceivable that Cecily found in her faith an angry affirmation of, and vindication for, the vicissitudes imposed upon her family and those they had imposed upon themselves. In the years of Cecily’s childhood, Thomas à Kempis had written in his
Imitation of Christ
of the rashness of relying on anyone but God, of the triumph in the Last Judgement of the oppressed over the oppressor: ‘Then shall rightwise men stand in great [constaunce] against them that have anguished them and oppressed them.’ At the very least Cecily must have needed the power of prayer to clear and focus the mind; to achieve that state of integration and acceptance that in the Middle Ages could only be couched in spiritual terms.
Like many devout women, Cecily probably made a particular identification with the Virgin Mary: relevant for a mother who lost two sons to political strife. St Bridget’s prayer of the
Fifteen Oes
specifically encourages the devout to share the pain of Christ and of the Virgin; a few years later, Margaret Beaufort would collaborate with Elizabeth of York to commission a printed version from Caxton. Religious enthusiasm was a powerful link between almost all these women: a socially and morally acceptable way, perhaps, of evading or triumphing over other divides.
I swear, ’tis better to be lowly born,
And range with humble livers in content,
Than to be perked up in a glist’ring grief,
And wear a golden sorrow.
Henry VIII
, 2.3
The saga of Clarence’s death had demonstrated the divisions in the ruling York family, and at the same time had drawn attention to the important and at times divisive role played in English affairs by Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy.
The life she had been leading in her widowhood was, on a day-to-day level, a good one, despite the turmoils that had followed Duke Charles’s death in 1477. Burgundy was replete with the profits of trade: Margaret’s new home would be rich in tapestries, a single example of which could cost a wealthy landowner a whole year’s income, and in books. In tapestries and other depictions Margaret is seen at falconry and the hunt; one, entitled
The Bear Hunt
, shows her riding side-saddle on a horse led by a groom.
As her stepdaughter Mary’s marriage to Archduke Maximilian bore fruit, Margaret stood godmother to her children. Her dower lands included a prosperous and well-maintained collection of villages and towns. She chose to make her main residence at Malines in Brabant, purchasing a number of adjoining houses which she extended and rebuilt in red brick decorated with white stripes, with a balcony on which she could display herself to the people. She commissioned gardens designed to be seen from her palace windows, as well as a tennis court, a shooting gallery and hot baths. She had a chair of state, in the vast council chamber, upholstered in fine black velvet; and a study hung with violet taffeta, its beautiful books and manuscripts protected by a wrought-iron grille. She had her volumes on chess, her knives with handles of ebony and ivory, her knight of honour and her doctors, her dogs, her horses and her maker of preserves.